Recently somebody at Rakuten contacted me for a software engineer position in Corporate IT Department (CITD). Although I am looking for a role change, I am not sure about Rakuten as reviews seems to be very bad (across geographies and mainly Japan) in Reddit and Job review sites like Blind, Indeed and Glassdoor. These reviews are not for this particular department but in general they sounded the company and mainly the management is pretty bad.
Anybody who is familiar with this CITD please suggest if this department is also equally bad and about Rakuten in general. I appreciate your time.
3 comments
Rakuten is like any big company. It depends on the department and your manager. I worked there for a year and had a Japanese manager but his management style was similar to silicon valley. He would never deny a request for a day off, even if it was same day. You could take a few hours off in the morning or afternoon if you had things to do. Never cared about how much you worked and if your work was late he was willing to work with you to help you finish it. The job was pretty boring and I’m not really interested in what I was doing (internal tools) but it was a decent place and I liked my team. Unfortunately, you will not know any of this until you join and it seems like Rakuten has a lot of bad teams from the reviews. But in my experience it was a decent place to work.
My coworker is non Japanese ex rakuten. He says rakuten has really old tech stack and the structure is really traditional.
It’s not a bad company per se….
It’s ok but there are much better options. It’s a good ticket into the software engineering industry if that’s what you’re interested in. Stay for a year or two and jump to a better situation as soon as you can