Ignore the astro-turfed reviews, this place is terrible
Pros
They're good at sponsoring engineers so you can come to Japan to change to a real company
Cons
- Inept and overpopulated middle management that grinds any progress to a halt through bad decisions or micromanaging things. Rakuten usually promotes internally for management positions, usually to male Japanese staff. Management are generally all sycophants of Mikitani's cult and have long tenure at Rakuten. - Insanely conservative and cult-like corporate policies that are pervasive in your everyday work. Monday mornings you'll have the privilege of coming to work an hour early to attend what is essentially a Rakuten political rally and get a 15 minute speech from Mikitani himself. It's clear he has little clue about anything tech related and is only attempting to repeat whatever he read over the weekend or overheard at some event from actually influential people. - Low pay and worthless stock benefits. RKUNY is down nearly 50% YoY and nearly 75% down from its all time high 3 years ago. I have little confidence in this changing anytime soon. 10 yearly paid days (legal minimum) for all new hires regardless of rank and, depending on your manager, you may not even be able to take them. - Terrible project management policies. Over sharing of information and endless repeated meetings. For example in my group we had 3 kickoff meetings for each new project: first for management (4 middle managers for 15 developers..), then to full time staff, and finally to all staff in the group. By the time of the final presentation, the project would be about half complete and you'd be preparing presentation material for its release. And naturally, you'd have to present the release material another three times, too. - Bad classical music playing in all the hallways and bathrooms constantly at fairly high volume. The same few songs on repeat all day. We joked that it's probably to stop people from idling in the hallways as much, but it's probably true. - There's -always- a queue for the men's toilets since each floor is overcrowded and people are lazy and sleep or use their phones in the toilets. The above points lead to very low morale overall, and people come and go fairly quickly. It's pretty common to see people sleeping at their desks for hours every day, and months of delays are very common, especially for feature requests to internal departments. I couldn't take it anymore after a year and found a much better job, thankfully.
