Rakuten reviews

Personal Growth : It completely depends on the department you work for in Rakuten. If you are working in some kind of big service then you can expect little bit better working environment and always opt for the department with more foreigners if you want good work-life balance. Not very technically strong work so for any kind of personal growth you have to strive hard and force the management to use new stuff (which is very difficult to convince). And expect very less growth positino wise also because if there is an opening for Manager position it will always be a Japanese person given more preference. Compensation growth : This is the worst part about Rakuten. The salary increments are really really really very slow. So most of the people (specially non-japanese) leave the company within 2 years. Becuase specifically for technical background people there are many high compensation paying jobs available in Tokyo(atleast compared to Rakuten). Working Environment : If you are a non-japanese person, please try your best to get into departments which has got more foreigners. Your life will be much less miserable. And all that misconception about (Rakuten is Englishnized) is complete myth. There are very less departments which actually use English as official language. New Service Departments : If you want to get any kind of good evaluation and increments don't even think of going to new service department. These are the small departments in Rakuten with a user base of less than some thousands. You will be stuck in these departments with no growth at all.

Here are some of the things they didn't tell me when I signed on to work at Rakuten: 1. EVERY TUESDAY THE ENTIRE COMPANY IS AT THE OFFICE FROM 8 AM For "asakai." Though, to be fair, most people use a website to get out of it. 2. THERE IS A 50% CHANCE YOU WILL BE GUILT-TRIPPED INTO PERFORMING IN A DANCE COMPETITION Yeah. I didn't believe it either but you'll train daily for 2 hours--unpaid--and if you don't take part in it you'll be seen as selfish and not a team player. Your opportunities will be diminished. 3. BULLYING IS WIDELY AND OPENLY ACCEPTED You'd think that as a foreigner, you'd be at least *slightly* immune to the outrageous bullying culture that takes place in Japan--not the case. I have many friends whose entire lives (down to their Facebooks) were monitored, and the humiliation of employees in front of the entire room (THERE ARE NO CUBICLES) is common and accepted 4. YOUR WORK/LIFE BALANCE IS A JOKE TO THEM I was regularly asked to stay until 11--and sometimes OVERNIGHT--to get things done that simply did not need to be done as quickly as higher ups demanded. However, the authoritarian mindset runs so deeply within many of these people, that their brainwashing forces them to do whatever is asked of them... or else. Though for some reason, NOBODY gets fired... even when they abuse employees like throwing books at them or sexually harass them, they just get a slap on the wrist and lose a little face. The latter part of this is certainly Japanese, but in my 4 years working in Japan this was the first organization I saw that didn't fire people.