Pros
Free lunch (Free breakfast if you come before 8:30, free dinner if you stay after 7) Nice office
Cons
First of all, Rakuten is not a IT company. It is not Google, Facebook, Amazon. Other IT companies allow you to spend working hours to do innovation. Rakuten asks you to spend your personal time to do innovation which benefits Rakuten, e.g. preparing Rakuten Hackathon. It's their management style. They like to work overtime and sleep in meetings. They track your working hour at the door gate and you will be asked why leaving early (e.g. 6). There is no open source project from Rakuten and they don't even contribute money to open source even they like those "free" software very much. They just think it's free why they need to give money. They don't respect technology from their heart. Other Japanese companies (e.g. Uniqlo, Mercari) have flexible working hours. In Rakuten, our CEO said we should work as "One" unit, so everybody needs to come at the same time. However, they also try to double the number of people in India. There is 3.5 hour timezone difference, so you can't work with Indian teams as "One" unit. You always need to stay overtime to work with them. Their policies always contradict with each other. Salary is low that even manager gets less than developer in other Japanese companies. They have a 4-year plan to catch up (just catch up, not take over) with other companies. Turnover rate is high, especially senior developers who have experience to judge what good company is.
