Rakuten

Generally friendly environment, you can really be friends with coworkers.

Free food every day.

Office parties/bonding 1-2 times per month, with celebrations for different festivities of different countries and cultures.

Plenty of snacks and drinks in the pantry.

Tables that go up and down, so you can stand/sit while working comfortably.

Generally flexible working arrangements (no work from home though) which can allow people with children or part-time school/courses to schedule their work around their other commitments.

Some opportunity to go for overseas conferences or training.

A small group of newer employees who are very excited to change things up for the better, both in engineering and management.

English-nization is a lie. Business still works in only Japanese, and even in engineering, more than half the documents and meetings are in Japanese. New Japanese documents are still created every day, despite official company policy that says work is to be done in English.

Despite that, many non-Japanese speakers came in expecting to be able to use English at work, which does not pan out as expected. Some meetings end up taking double the time because somebody has to translate everything to the other language. Either that, or one side gets completely left out when one language dominates.

On the flip side, good Japanese engineers who can't speak English either quit or don't get hired, or are hired as part-time/contract staff to circumvent the policy, which defeats the purpose of the policy and seems unfair to the Japanese staff.

Performance review is done purely top-down, with superiors giving performance evaluations to their members purely based on what the member claims they have done and what the manager sees (which is not much, especially if the team is big and a non-technical manager is reviewing technical members). There's no way to give feedback regarding your own superior, causing no outlet to feedback on management practices that can be improved. 360 feedback was proposed but was repeatedly rejected and ignored. Recently, some managers try to introduce nomination-based peer-review, but not all managers are on board with even this.

Feedback regarding different aspects of the company are sometimes solicited, but the response then disappears into thin air, with the topic never to be heard of again.

CEO likes to say that Rakuten is a "tech company" but actually does not care about technology. Rakuten's own research department finds it very hard to do actual technical research with a longer time horizon because the CEO insists on only doing projects with short-term business impact (more profit or cost cutting). There is more focus on churning out services as fast as possible, even if backed with fragile, aging technology hacks, which causes problems in the long run.

This attitude permeates down the command chain, with middle managers refusing to learn and update tech as long as the current web of systems somehow barely works. "We don't know X, so we don't want to consider doing X" is an actual excuse used to not do something.

Teams are highly protective of their own systems, refusing collaboration from other teams ("don't touch my things" attitude), making teamwork very difficult. Teams push responsibilities to each other and would rather sit on what they have instead of working together to solve a common problem.

Technical design is just not done. Multiple copies of systems with very similar or even identical capabilities can be developed at the same time (partly due to the mentality above), and overall system architecture is not considered. Attempts to simplify/merge systems are met with resistance from teams refusing to let go of their own thing and work together with other teams. Renewal of old systems is done without thinking why the renewal was needed in the first place and just ends up being a reimplementation of the old system on a different programming language or framework version, which defeats the purpose of the renewal efforts.

Generally, not recommended for engineers who'd like to work on the latest technology and challenge novel problems, unless you have the perseverance of breaking through all the inertia walls first and doing catch-up by building all the required infrastructure from scratch. There are a small group of people who are working on this, but there are still a mountain of things to do.

As mentioned, there are a small group of newer employees who are very excited to change things up for the better, both in engineering and management.

Listen to them.

And actually do something instead of just throwing "we will consider" to every feedback (or simply not saying anything).

I am writing this because it seems an article saying Rakuten is the 2nd worst company based on Glassdoor seems to have stirred up some response inside the company. All of the feedback above have actually been conveyed while I was in the company, but if Glassdoor reviews can bring about more change than internal feedback, I thought I'd give it a shot.