Never have I seen a company with so much potential to succeed coupled together with a high probability of failing as Rakuten. The company proudly proclaims themselves a “Global” company by doing the following:
- Buying Foreign Companies like Kobo, Viki, Viber, Slice, Ebates
- Hiring a diverse workforce from different countries
- Making English the “official” language of the company
But the culture of Rakuten itself is Japanese through and through. Your work life in Rakuten will depend on which department you will be placed in. If you are not in a front-facing product, I believe you have the better deal. But if you are part of the core service and all your upper management are Japanese, then you will probably have the some, but not limited to the following experiences:
- Questions on why you or any of your team are not at your desk by 9am and asking to come to work at 9:15 was not acceptable. You will be ask to do support and monitoring during big events or be on-call for support on <insert some scenario here>. You will be questioned of every new technology or improvement you place in the system because they don't want you to break anything.
- When you make a mistake, it is announced to every stakeholder, and I do mean every. This is the kind of fail-shaming culture they promote. You need to report every minutiae of what caused precious GMS loss as they breathe down your neck asking when can you fix it or have you fixed it already and how can you never commit the same mistake, again. There are more people announcing problems left and right than people fixing it because there are more non-technical people who can only look at things from a visual perspective and sends an update to the manager and they can go on with their day while the development team fixes it. And when you do fix it, there is no appreciation from the people who reported because I guess, it is our job.
- These Non-technical people also decide on the implementation/validity of a product and the approval to release a product version. They have no understanding of features that improve the application itself because it does not relate to GMS. Development teams are treated like factory workers and are being closely monitored (Apparently, we cannot be idle). I am still somewhat grateful that my team still has the opportunity to do technical improvements, but with product management constantly asking to do small, mundane things for them because they don’t know how to do so ruins the safety net of each iteration. They don’t really respect the planned iteration itself. When we asked a few months ago for data regarding the features we delivered having any value, we are still waiting until now for the answer.
- When the development teams finish a feature, another team goes up and presents it like they did it because they thought of the idea, without mention of the team who did the actual implementation.
- Because of the constant flow of requirements, there is no chance to learn something new. Each meeting with management just consists of project status reports. There is no discussion on how to care for the people/ how to build their careers / how to improve process. Just the business-as-usual questions of why this X is not done or why did Y break or when is Z going to be finished. If you do not know the answer those questions, you will most likely be shamed and ridiculed for not knowing enough.
- Management style is strongly 1.0. I was lucky to have a previous manager that gave me evaluation feedback and do constant 1 on 1s, but now I just get a rating number without a comment. There were employee engagement surveys done since 2016 but planned action items are to be done within the next 2 years. I don’t know if I will stay here long enough to see it.
- You can try to fight the process and strive for change, but you can only do so much from being at the bottom level. There are too many hoops to jump through that you eventually get burnt out and say, is this even worth it? I have seen these wonderful, passionate people try to make a difference but it was so difficulty that and you see them give up slowly and just quit altogether.
