Rakuten

Free lunch (free breakfast if you come before 8:30, free dinner if you stay after 7) Nice office

First of all, Rakuten is not an IT company. It is not Google, Facebook, or Amazon.

Other IT companies allow you to spend working hours innovating. Rakuten asks you to spend your personal time innovating, which benefits Rakuten. For example, preparing for the Rakuten Hackathon is their management style. They like to work overtime and sleep in meetings. They track your working hours at the door gate, and you will be asked why you are leaving early (e.g., at 6 PM).

There are no open-source projects from Rakuten, and they don't even contribute money to open source, even though they like those "free" software products very much. They just think it's free, so why should they give money? They don't respect technology from their heart.

Other Japanese companies (e.g., Uniqlo, Mercari) have flexible working hours. At Rakuten, our CEO said we should work as "One" unit, so everybody needs to come at the same time. However, they also try to double the number of people in India. There is a 3.5-hour time zone difference, so you can't work with Indian teams as "One" unit. You always need to stay overtime to work with them. Their policies always contradict each other.

Salary is low; even managers get less than developers in other Japanese companies. They have a 4-year plan to catch up (just catch up, not take over) with other companies. The turnover rate is high, especially for senior developers who have the experience to judge what a good company is.

HR said dictatorship from the CEO is serious, to the point that even they can't improve much.

It means management should trust its employees.

Rakuten does many businesses for locals, e.g., wedding, cards, and mobile. They can't be scaled easily to the globe.

It means their growth rate cannot be IT company style.

They only want to overtake traditional companies in Japan with "existing" technology.

Management should think about what businesses they should do and try not to do anything else.