Pros: Free housing, a free plane ticket to Tokyo, and free food. Good coworkers and a pretty good learning experience. For the most part, my coworkers were very inspiring, and I have a group photo hung up on my wall. A few bad apples, but mostly really great, smart people. It is pretty incredible living and learning in Tokyo, and you will have a ton of fun exploring what the city has to offer. It is a transformational experience. Having Rakuten on your resume will open a lot of doors, I think. I was regularly getting invited to interview with Japanese start-ups. I interviewed for a full-time position at a pretty hip Japanese start-up while in Tokyo. It was my first time interviewing for a full-time position. Though people complain about the nametags in their reviews, I thought they were pretty cool.

Cons: The upper rungs of management at Rakuten are stuffed to the gills with truly incompetent people. The company claims to be an "innovation company," but it flat out innovates nothing. Though they employ many engineers and (compared to other companies in Tokyo) seem to pay well (terrible pay compared to the US), they are not focused on engineers, and people in the business unit tend to exert control over the development unit. You are also required to beg, grovel, and emphatically apologize on a group email list if you are going to be even ~15 minutes late to work. You have to write incredibly useless, stupid daily reports that are then sent out to everyone. I can see the argument of this increasing communication, but really it just increases the noise ratio, making it impossible to pick up the signal. My email became so cluttered and clogged, the Outlook client would regularly crash. Pointless stuff. There are seemingly infinite meetings. If you try to argue to have the meetings rescheduled to fit the development schedule better, they will say, "This is the way it has always been done, so we will continue to do it this way." Truly innovative... You are required to show up to Miki's weekly Japanese game show-esque 8 am company-wide meetings, called ASAKAI. At these meetings, you will learn nothing. Since you absolutely cannot miss more than two meetings, it was asked what employees should do if they fall ill on these days. The response from HR was to "not get sick." Your attendance at these meetings influences your salary increases each year. Great stuff... They asked engineers on my team to be on call and available to work nights in case something went wrong with the system they were working on. They did not offer any additional compensation for this. Again, true innovation! During my three months, two people quit. I worked on the 18th floor, where Mikitani also works. He is an empty suit who spent most of his time watching terrible Rakuten ads. Where Jeff Bezos spends his time telling the engineers of his company to adopt service-oriented architecture, Mikitani watches a fat cartoon panda dance on a screen.

Pros: A good way to start working in Japan.

Cons: Rakuten Mobile issues impact all the other departments, which now have way more pressure. Salary is lower than competitors.

Pros: Work-life balance in the tech division. English environment in the tech division.

Cons: So-so pay Mixed level of skill co-workers