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A valiant but disappointing effort at westernizing a Japanese company

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Rakuten for less than 1 year
March 3, 2019
Tokyo, Japan
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros
  • Free food
  • Good view from the higher floors
  • Relocation allowance
  • Sponsors a 5-year VISA
Cons
  • Low salary.
  • No flex time; everyone must start at 9:00 AM sharp. There is a salary reduction for being late 15+ minutes.
  • 40 hours of included overwork. Normal working hours are from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM. Arriving at 9:15 AM and leaving at 5:45 PM means a 15-minute pay deduction, but you do not get compensated for extra time worked at the end of the day unless your total overwork for the month exceeds 40 hours.
  • Paid amenities. Gym, etc., are advertised as amenities but are not free.
  • Advertised as 100% English speaking, but many teams still use Japanese.
  • An hour-long company-wide morning meeting every week is a total waste of time. The information is irrelevant to most people's work, and many sleep through it.
  • The bonus is fixed and decided based on rank.
  • Uses a lot of outdated technology, which is not good for learning as an engineer.
  • Very rigid, hierarchical management system.
  • High turnover rate.
  • Extremely prideful despite all the flaws.
Advice to Management
  • Treat your employees like human beings. If you want good talent, you need to build a company that's attractive enough for talented people to want to join. If you're trying to be companies like Google and Facebook, you can't pay a quarter of the salary and wonder why people keep leaving.

  • You need a proper hiring system. For engineers, you need proper coding interviews, not some random overlapping rectangle piece of cake.

  • You need to match talents to positions. You can't just assign anyone to any position and hope that they will love the job.

  • Update your technology and design, for God's sake. Again, no talented engineers will want to work on things that are a decade old. It doesn't help you grow and it doesn't prepare you for the future. Keep doing the same thing and in a few years, you'll be dead out of business.

  • Abolish the pointless Asakai. It's a complete waste of time. The only purpose it accomplishes is for management to feel good while rubbing their own ego, and that's not a good purpose anyway.

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