Rakuten reviews

- 9am company wide weekly meeting that is largely a waste of time. An opportunity for Mikitani to bloviate on the latest tech trend - General disrespect of employees. Anyone who worked there can give you numerous examples. - Some picnic tables outside are designated as "Executives only". No idea why. - Execs reserving rooms that they never use. It's common practice for execs to have a designated room but not common practice for said exec to walk right in the middle of a meeting to kick everyone out because he needs the room. Very rude and annoying because conference rooms were often booked making it already difficult without having rooms reserved for execs that stayed empty for the whole day. - Rumors of inappropriate work behavior. Not sure if it’s a cultural difference but could be misconstrued as harassment. - Inability to understand Silicon Valley culture. Rakuten is very top-down when the majority of the Valley is collaborative/flat. If you've ever watched Office Space, you have a good idea of what it's like to work at Rakuten. - Transportation is limited. You pretty much need a car to get to the office. Hayward Park Caltrain is 11 mins away walking but is not a main station so you have to take the Local. If you live in the East Bay, you'll need a car to get to the office since they no longer have shuttles. - Periodically will run out of food because they want to cut costs. This looks bad when you invite clients to onsite meetings. - No coherent company vision. Mikitani acquires companies based on how much he likes the CEO not based on whether the company can actually drive revenue for the overall business. This results in a bunch of incongruent companies that have no vision to shoot for and no goal to work toward.

Overworked, underpaid and underappreciated. You are required to work more than your contracted hours daily in order to deal with short staffing (a result of senior management's poor decisions) and fragile systems. There is no career progression in any area of the business and security in your job is poor. Upper management do not believe in their own staff's skill and never will no matter who they employ. In the last year, the direction senior management has taken the company has been uncoordinated, clumsy and short sighted. This will only continue long into the future as they stay making these decisions.