Rakuten Employee Reviews
Out of 110 Rakuten employee reviews, 72% were positive. The remaining 28% were constructive reviews with the goal of helping Rakuten improve their work culture. The Engineering team, with 53% positive reviews, reports the best experience at Rakuten compared to all other departments at the company.
What does the leadership team need to get better at?
Listen to your employee , stop using Japanese management philosophy when you hire 80% of employees are from oversea
Review from Engineering Dept
Treating people like humans and understand what they are actually doing. And not stab their co-workers in the back.
Review from Engineering Dept
Rakuten leadership figures are sorely lacking both at vision and execution. The first thing they should do ASAP is replacing most middle management and then working on improving the overall company engineering culture.
Review from Engineering Dept
Identifying employees' strengths. Expecting to just plug any person in at any random job, Japanese-style, destroys morale.
Need to modernize their means, listen to people and question decisions from above that might have issues
Review from Engineering Dept
Why do you feel undervalued and what would make you feel better about your compensation?
An increment and quality employee benefits and services
Pay shud be proportional to the level
Japan as a whole is behind the rest of the market when it comes to compensation, and Rakuten has been making some efforts to take the lead in closing this gap, but they could do better.
Review from Engineering Dept
Not having team managers create a lawsuit against coworkers they don't like, and/or be stabbed in the back for coming with suggestions would be a good start
Review from Engineering Dept
I would like to be able to work from home full time, not just part time.
Review from Engineering Dept
What do your coworkers need to improve and how could you work together better?
It's hard to imagine a company with more time spent in inefficient meetings than Rakuten's.
We would work better if we were allowed to do what's best for the stakeholders, instead of being forced to follow directions coming from a leadership team that has proved time and time again of not knowing what they are talking about.
People is the best thing of the company, but they tend to get lazy after a few months because nothing can be easily changed in this company
Review from Engineering Dept
What needs to change to make the company culture better?
Allow collaboration between teams instead of forcing teams to reinvent the wheel over and over. Require accountability and post-mortem improvements. Replace most middle management by promoting based on actual contributions, not based on connections. Keep the egos of leadership figures in check.
Review from Engineering Dept
Far too many long and boring meetings; decisions are always top-down.
What would you improve about your company's interview process?
Standardize the interview process Make it more transparent (to both interviewers and non-management members who are involved in the process) Give more tools to interviewers for verifying skills
Review from Engineering Dept
What's going wrong and how can it be improved?
Change the management and listen to your employee
Review from Engineering Dept
Engineering decisions are made by people that should have no saying in such matters. People are promoted based on connections instead of actual contributions.
Review from Engineering Dept
Mr. Mikitani preaches internationalism and the use of English in the workplace worldwide, but deep down this is another Japanese sweatshop.
There are SO MANY wrong things, and they take SO MUCH TIME to improve... everything is very slow...\nMost of problems come from Business side
Review from Engineering Dept
What would you most like to see improved at your company?
Pay attention to employee satisfaction and quality of life.