Rakuten reviews

Top management does not have enough commitment for a strategy, accordingly the company goes back and forth, which in the end led to achieving nothing.

- 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.