Prós
- Free meals (Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner) - The headquarters office in Tokyo is located in a nice neighborhood. - Highly possible to attend an overseas conference once a year. - Having a high chance to meet many smart people from different backgrounds, who may become your best friends through overcoming a crisis together at Rakuten. - A good stepping stone to work in Japan. - A perfect company for learning traditional Japanese working culture and inter-cultural communications. - A lot of people earn money by doing nothing and the job security is extremely high. - If your childhood dream job is a firefighter, Rakuten is a perfect company to fulfill your dream.
Contras
- Finger pointing culture is very deep-rooted in Rakuten. When something goes wrong, it is common that people blame each other first, rather than helping each other to fix the problem. - A lot of employees at Rakuten fear to make mistakes or lose face; therefore, they tend not to make any changes/improvements. To make matters worse, they prefer covering up problems to fixing/reporting them. - A quick and dirty approach is preferable to the best practices and standards. As a result, most software developers at Rakuten tend to develop low-quality and unmaintainable software just to "get things done" by the deadline. Unfortunately, this approach causes the technical debts to accumulate over time and it is now impossible to repay. - People come and go and nobody cares. Due to its reputation, Rakuten can attract a lot of talents from all around the world but it cannot retain them longer than a couple of years. - English is an official language in Tokyo office but a lot of important documents are still written in Japanese only. Besides, most Japanese employees, especially senior managers, cannot speak or even understand English. - Below average salary for experienced and educated engineers. - Rakuten waste thousands of man-hours on a company-wide weekly meeting. Every Monday at 8am, All regular employees MUST attend this weekly meeting and listen to the narcissistic CEO bragging about himself and his irrational daydream. - Toilets are occupied most of the time because some people use them to take a nap or play mobile games.