Rakuten reviews

- 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.

1. This company is a soul crushing experience for any serious software developer. You will spend considerable time preparing confluence documents. 2. They have some of the worst software developers I have come across who will victmise you for telling the best practice followed everywhere in community for development and coding of software applications. On top of it, if you ask a reason for why they want to follow their age old practice, they will say its because their manager told so and its a 'Rule'. You have no right to change it, 3. The code being developed in this company is crap, spahagetti code and all they care about doing things fast without following any code practice. 4. Take my word, you cannot learn a thing here and whatsoever you have already learned will not be taken by those your leads you will have. 5. Its full of politics where incompetent developers are rewarded for just not speaking for what is right and flattering their leads and managers. 6. Forget about any framework, practice in place and learn to do hacky way of coding. 7. This company is only for managers and not software engineers. 8. Their business strategy is not growing and all being potrayed out is sham! They are already closing in many places. 9. In Rakuten Travel they want to create a team of 1000 devs, but they don't know that all good developers are leaving them for all the nasty politics and pathetic coding and software development practice being used. 10. In Rakuten Travel, you will surely (lucky if you dont!) have leads who are leads just because they licked their managers or have spend 12-13 years here, if you ask them some concepts they don't even know basic things like String in java is immutable and they will fight with you and not even healthy argument for imposing String in java is mutable. 11. They claim they develop REST APIs (Rakuten Travel to be specific) but when you see their code base, they even do insert/update in database in GET endpoints and thats is not legacy code, its a new development! When you try to pitch in and say its wrong, you will be yelled at. 12. Use of tools , frameworks is non existent and they will follow the 'Rule' even if it does not make sense. 13. My lead who thought he is a genius, always blames and single out people for even slightest mistake of a staging build failure and himself does nothing on the name of so called R&D. In whole 1 year he did no software development. If you see his old code, you will cry out loud to see such worst code causing so many bugs later. 14. Be ready to get your work and credit taken by your lead and seeing him getting award for it, You will not get any credit. 15. Clean code, Separation of concerns in software development, adding tests: Are you serious? Thats insanity for them. They just want to deliver crappy code which fails 1000 times on production and cause numerous bugs but they are fine with that. 16. Some of the worst developers you will come across here.