A great place to work for a few years; after that it's "Black Hole For Your Career 4.0"
Pros
- If you have intermediate- to upper-level Japanese and want to take a job where you can improve on it, Rakuten could be just the right niche for you. Some departments are more English-ized than others and some demand a level of Japanese far higher. This company is a great way to get to Japan and work in a professional setting for a few years before moving on. - The CEO is visible and accessible at the weekly morning meetings. Want to ask him a question? Submit it and he might answer. These meetings take a lot of criticism for the discipline they require (arrive at 7:57 AM or earlier, or face punishment) and the time they waste, but you *do* get an opportunity to talk with the CEO in person. - Cafeteria provides three meals a day. Be aware that breakfast ends early and dinner begins late; you will be working uncompensated hours to get this "free" food. And perhaps they are hoping that by eating in-house, people will not notice that the salaries they pay are not enough to make a habit of eating out in the (quite expensive) neighborhood. - Friendly to disabled and LGBT employees — though there are few women in upper management. Parental leave exists. And of course the company is one of the most foreign-friendly in Japan. - Modern, pleasant-looking office environment with adjustable-height desks. Not all of the sub-companies have this (the upper floors are like something out of 1984), but if you're lucky you'll be in a sub-company with this kind of feel. - Work-life balance is nothing like the horror stories you will hear about certain Japanese companies like Dentsu and NTT. However (moving on to the Cons)...
Cons
- ...your salary includes 30-40 hours of overtime (meaning if you work 43 hours of OT in a month, you get paid for 3 of them). But in some of the sub-companies, if you ever arrive a minute late, you have to consume half a day of PTO. Which is a part of... - A petty, pervasive frugality, with cost-cutting disguised as energy-saving. Indoor temperatures of 28°C; elevators only stopping on certain floors which rotate each month; a PTO system where paid time off is hard to take. - The company's biggest obsession: Rules. Other reviewers have described the rules about nametags, clean desks, locked drawers, and other things in great detail: they are all true and the system will try your patience. - The other obsession is with KPIs and ‘kaizen’ (incremental improvement). Every employee must set five to seven measurable goals every six months and then complete them. And because everyone around you is constantly having to come up with goals that can definitely be completed, there will be barely-meaningful changes made to your workflow around you. Get an inexplicable demand to, forevermore from this point, copy-paste some data into a second spreadsheet before saving, to prevent a 1% chance of fat-fingering something? Probably someone's KPI/kaizen requirement. These requirements do not decrease with time; you will have to set new goals at the same rapid pace in your twentieth half=year as in your second half-year. - Lots of intimidation and "power harassment" and overworked middle management taking their frustrations out on their subordinates. Assuming you are not a local, even if your Japanese is *excellent*, you might struggle to deal with these situations. A screaming Japanese boss can *destroy* your self-worth; do not discount this. And with turnover so high, you can never settle in with a boss with whom you have good rapport. Odds are he’ll be gone in 12-18 months and you will be back at the starting line trying to impress a new boss who may or may not have expected to have a non-Japanese subordinate. - With that in mind, there are *very few* non-Japanese in management roles; even middle management. The amount of paperwork and documentation demanded of middle management probably means you don't want to rise to that level, unless your Japanese is native-like and effortless. Those things, unlike "Asakai" morning meeting presentations, are not done in English. - Salaries, while normal by Japan's standards, basically never go up unless you're in management or one of the top 5-10% of performers. Tremendous pressure on middle management to cut costs in every way means that no matter how hard you work, you probably won't be rewarded. Software engineers in particular could make much more in the USA. You would also have enough vacation to visit Japan once a year and still come out far ahead financially.
