Rakuten

Free Lunch:

This is really something you can cherish about Rakuten. It has got one of the best lunch options you can have. There is a variety of lunch options like Chinese, Indian, Pasta, and almost all types of Japanese food, and all this is free.

They have dinner also for a very low price (like around 300-400 yen), which is also pretty decent.

And you can buy drinks in Rakuten for half the price of convenience store prices.

Work:

If you are lucky to get into some department like Smart Device, Open Service Platform, or Big Data, then you might have good work experience and good managers also. But you always need to have a good connection with managers to get a good evaluation.

Personal Growth:

It completely depends on the department you work for in Rakuten. If you are working in some kind of big service, then you can expect a little bit better working environment. Always opt for the department with more foreigners if you want good work-life balance.

Not very technically strong work, so for any kind of personal growth, you have to strive hard and force the management to use new stuff (which is very difficult to convince).

And expect very less growth position-wise also, because if there is an opening for a Manager position, it will always be a Japanese person given more preference.

Compensation Growth:

This is the worst part about Rakuten. The salary increments are really, really, really very slow. So most of the people (especially non-Japanese) leave the company within 2 years. Because specifically for technical background people, there are many high compensation paying jobs available in Tokyo (at least compared to Rakuten).

Working Environment:

If you are a non-Japanese person, please try your best to get into departments that have more foreigners. Your life will be much less miserable. And all that misconception about Rakuten being "English-ized" is a complete myth. There are very few departments which actually use English as the official language.

New Service Departments:

If you want to get any kind of good evaluation and increments, don't even think of going to a new service department. These are small departments in Rakuten with a user base of less than some thousands. You will be stuck in these departments with no growth at all.

You need to give a better package to engineers, otherwise they are going to leave sooner or later.

Also consider non-Japanese people for promotions.

And please, please, please increase the level of employees you hire.

There are a bunch of people in Rakuten doing nothing at all.