Rakuten reviews

3.6

71% would recommend to a friend

(3,537 total reviews)
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Hiroshi Mikitani

78% approve of CEO

56% positive business outlook

Rakuten has an employee rating of 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 3,537 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Rakuten employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

4K reviews
3.0
Sep 25, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Project can bring real business value.

Cons

Sometimes you just cannot get time to fix a bug, the reason is "because we have to do business".... But when things runs into issue, you still need to use your own time to do on call to fix it.

4.0
Sep 25, 2025

Rakuten

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

All Good , Work Life Balance, Good salary

Cons

No Bonus, No Stocks , No Cab Facility

2.0
Sep 25, 2025

Almost a black company

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Offers full-time positions in Japan for offshore applicants. Pays (partial) relocation fee. English environment. Free meals. No one asks me to work overtime. The official working hours are quite flexible. The working hours are calculated across the entire month rather than fixated each day.

Cons

Pay is lower than industry, and the low pay raise is an insult. Oh, who says your pay will always rise instead of falling? All employees have a quota for selling SIM cards. New joiners are constantly pressured to meet the quota. The company has been losing money for maybe 6 years, largely because of their mobile carrier business. Working from home is allowed only 1 day. CEO said this in one of his grand and vague speech: "I hate work-life balance". CEO keeps pushing AI for everything, no matter if you need it. He invented another misspelled word called AI-nization. Insane idolism. There is a morning meeting every Monday to read the CEO's book and listen to him talking about his grand and vague ideas for 30 minutes. There is a Q&A session in the end where some new grad asks some grand and vague questions, followed by more of his grand and vague ideas. New joiners even need to join a meeting every day to study his book. Feels like a cult. Heavy bureaucracy. You spend most of your time on paperwork, chasing approvals and other processes. A simple feature that takes 2 weeks to implement can drag for 2 months just in pre-production. No one wants to take ownership. People go to work to look after a burden rather than growing a product. "Super Sale" 4 times a year plus heavy bureaucracy makes it impossible for agile development. Waterfall is the only way. They prefer no change over innovation. Overall, the whole business culture is more salesperson mindset than IT. CEO was never an engineer, so he doesn't really know about much in technology, but well we all have to listen to him. The business is a joke compared to Amazon, his imaginary rival. All things considered, if my pay were doubled, I probably would not have cared about any of this.

Viewing 190 - 192 of 3,537 Reviews

Glassdoor has 4,189 Rakuten reviews submitted anonymously by Rakuten employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Rakuten is right for you.