Rakuten reviews

- The skill difference is too large. -- Until these two years, the company was not asking for technical experience when they decided to hire an engineer. They used the same training program for engineers, sales, marketing, etc. At last the position was decided by some unclear rule. -- As a result, most of my colleagues don't know the basics of programming. Their knowledge about programming is to write shell commands and draw flow charts. They often come up with weird ideas when they are solving some problems. They will decline better ideas just because it seems harder to implement (even if it's a common practice). - Everything needs to be reported to the senior employees / manager, and every single improvement needs to be shared with everyone and ask for their advice. This makes improvement processes very very long. - Internal systems are difficult to use and lack documentation. Many operations are still done manually. It's a good news because it will be a great chance to improve the systems. However it's hard to start improvement projects because of the reasons above. - Englishnization is too difficult. No one can use English for everyday work in my team. - Promotion is too slow. The management is still Japanese-style. Dedication is highly evaluated but not performance. - The company is not a Internet company. The core of Rakuten's business model is ECC (e-commerce consultant) who makes calls to merchants. It does matter whether the system is easy to use/scale or not.

I have worked for some traditional Japanese companies as a foreigner, and I joined Rakuten because I thought it is more global. But as mentioned in many other reviews, it is just the look from outside, inside, it is close to a traditional Japanese company with some more or less desperate efforts to globalize, nothing more... Beside that, - depending on department, terrible work/life balance (work until last train, sometimes over night or on weekends, phone calls from boss on holidays, etc.), foreign staff that tries to retain some work/life balance is secretly laughed at and perceived as lazy by default - absurd rules (forced to attend famous asakai, forced to attend morning meeting with close to zero insight value, forced to buy baseball tickets (up to 5 tickets per employee, no matter whether you really go or not!), forced to attend nomikai, forced to read (=buy) books of CEO etc.) - very politic, as mentioned in many other reviews, no equal chances for foreign staff/ female staff - in case of Japanese/foreign mixed team, English/Japanese bilingual can have hard times because they need to mediate between non-Japanese speaking foreign staff and (almost) non-English speaking Japanese staff and doing lots of translation (especially new grads) for non-English speaking senior staff - in meetings conducted in English, excluding the still very few people who are actually able to communicate in English, you need to listen to speakers staring at their smartphone screen the whole time to read every single word, more or less badly pronounced, directly from google translate Beside that, I strongly recommend to read the summary of the review "Wearing the mask of Internationalization. ” posted on Nov 22, 2014. Very much to the point, nothing to add.