Rakuten

• IT specs don't need to speak Japanese.

• Hiring and relocation processes are regular and go quite smoothly.

• You'll meet lots of talented and fun people.

• If lucky, you would also work with them in the same department or team.

• Some departments are very liberal and truly focus on making great software.

Rakuten is really one of the good options for your first company in Japan if you're an IT spec.

The company is making an effort to provide a better environment for its employees, sponsoring clubs to bring people together and organizing team buildings.

There are free meals, a gym, and some other facilities in the main office (as of May 2021, most of them were shut down because of the pandemic).

You might be assigned to a position that is completely below or out of your qualification. That happened to me, so I decided to transfer to another team.

The departments are very different by culture and work/life balance. The more Japanese a department or team is, the less pleasant it is for a foreigner.

Still a Japanese company with some weird things they call a Rakuten culture, but really, it's just a bunch of obsolete rituals, such as the Monday morning all-hands meeting.

The office, before the pandemic, had some problems with queuing to the cafeteria and toilets. Some of you might have heard of toilet doorbells :)

Career growth sometimes takes a long time. You will be stuck within the same grade with a tiny salary bump every half a year. It's easier to leave the company and come back again with a bigger offer than to organically grow within the company.

Salaries are barely competitive compared to what other companies in Tokyo offer to foreign engineers.