Avis d'employé de Rakuten sur « asakai »

Inconvénients

HR is bad; Miscommunication is common in the company; Most people do not know what to do; Work space is noisy; Many random meetings and distraction during a workday; Asakai (Monday morning all-company meeting) is mandatory for promotion.

Inconvénients

1. Asakai, which drives most of people crazy.
2. Japanese work style although it says it’s a “global company”.
3. Low salary.
4. Your evaluation is fully controlled by your manager.
5. Innovation? Seriously?
6. Due date >>> quality
7. No training for new graduate engineers, they treat you as mid career employees.
...

Inconvénients

- ...your salary includes 30-40 hours of overtime (meaning if you work 43 hours of OT in a month, you get paid for 3 of them). But in some of the sub-companies, if you ever arrive a minute late, you have to consume half a day of PTO. Which is a part of...

- A petty, pervasive frugality, with cost-cutting disguised as energy-saving. Indoor temperatures of 28°C; elevators only stopping on certain floors which rotate each month; a PTO system where paid time off is hard to take.

- The company's biggest obsession: Rules. Other reviewers have described the rules about nametags, clean desks, locked drawers, and other things in great detail: they are all true and the system will try your patience.

- The other obsession is with KPIs and ‘kaizen’ (incremental improvement). Every employee must set five to seven measurable goals every six months and then complete them. And because everyone around you is constantly having to come up with goals that can definitely be completed, there will be barely-meaningful changes made to your workflow around you. Get an inexplicable demand to, forevermore from this point, copy-paste some data into a second spreadsheet before saving, to prevent a 1% chance of fat-fingering something? Probably someone's KPI/kaizen requirement. These requirements do not decrease with time; you will have to set new goals at the same rapid pace in your twentieth half=year as in your second half-year.

- Lots of intimidation and "power harassment" and overworked middle management taking their frustrations out on their subordinates. Assuming you are not a local, even if your Japanese is *excellent*, you might struggle to deal with these situations. A screaming Japanese boss can *destroy* your self-worth; do not discount this. And with turnover so high, you can never settle in with a boss with whom you have good rapport. Odds are he’ll be gone in 12-18 months and you will be back at the starting line trying to impress a new boss who may or may not have expected to have a non-Japanese subordinate.

- With that in mind, there are *very few* non-Japanese in management roles; even middle management. The amount of paperwork and documentation demanded of middle management probably means you don't want to rise to that level, unless your Japanese is native-like and effortless. Those things, unlike "Asakai" morning meeting presentations, are not done in English.

- Salaries, while normal by Japan's standards, basically never go up unless you're in management or one of the top 5-10% of performers. Tremendous pressure on middle management to cut costs in every way means that no matter how hard you work, you probably won't be rewarded. Software engineers in particular could make much more in the USA. You would also have enough vacation to visit Japan once a year and still come out far ahead financially.

Inconvénients

Unfortunately this company does not care about their employees. Turnover rate is high and after every 6 months (after evaluation) a lot of people will leave. Instead of fixing problems, HR is trying to brainwash their employees. 'Asakai' which is a propaganda event in company is mandatory for everyone. If you are not joining, you will get punished.

Most of managers and some executives joined as new grads and were promoted to their current stage. They have no idea how to run business or their organization. They have no idea about leadership or how to motivate their employees.

Culture is toxic and internal politics is stopping a lot of projects to be delivered in time. It is not rare when whole project is postponed and 'Partner staffs' laid off due to internal politics.

Tech wise, company has a lot of legacy systems that are difficult to maintain. Troubles happen often and usually engineers (not managers) will get blamed.

Inconvénients

Don't believe to the so called "englishnization". It's a pure marketing trick to attract talents from outside Japan. The reality is that English speaking capabilities are required only to staff members, but not for contractors, so basically half the population of the company doesn't understand a word of what you say. This means half of your team.
Even worse, the totality of the business unit people (staff or not) don't speak a word of English and they even REFUSE to speak or even write two slides in English, even if they know you are in the team. It's not uncommon to not be even invited to meetings because they know you can't speak Japanese.

There is no career growth if you don't speak Japanese, at Rakuten.

Salary speaking, Rakuten gives you also less money than the average in Tokyo.

Even worse, Rakuten is famous among Japanese and foreigners who live in Japan since mid-long time, for the "bizarre company practices" such as the "asakai" (the infamous Monday morning meeting, the most useless thing you will ever see in your professional career worldwide), or the essays that you must write about the books written by the "God Mikitani". People will make fun of you. It's terrible.

So, no reasons whatsoever to join this company. I am leaving.

Inconvénients

There are so many things to put here, I'm not sure where to start.

( 1 ) They started playing loud classical music in all of the hallways (24/7) and the bathrooms. If your desk happens to be anywhere near a hallway door, you will hear it ALL DAY LONG.

( 2 ) Every Monday morning you will come into work an hour early (the entire company) for the most boring meeting of your life, called "Asakai". You will need to come to the office and scan your badge on a special tracking machine, because if you don't attend this meeting every week it can be used to prevent your salary-grade promotions.

( 3 ) Speaking of tracking machines, every day your badge scans when you enter and exit the building and inputs that information into the attendance system. If you work less than the required hours in a day, your salary will be deducted. Polar opposite of flexible working hours.

( 4 ) Everything is based on how something appears. Management cares more that something appears good, than if it is actually good. Hard to give an exact example, but it's something you will quickly pick up on if you work here.

( 5 ) The evaluations systems here are very poor. They are set up in a way that your manager will essentially be looking at "why you shouldn't get a salary increase" as opposed to "why you should". Evaluation criteria works against you.

( 6 ) Speaking of salary increases, they will be slow. Don't expect a good salary at this company. That's why all of our great engineers leave the company for others.

( 7 ) You will need to take dozens of these tests called "E-Learnings" in order to get a salary-grade promotion. They are essentially a test which consists of between 40-100 powerpoint slides with a test at the end. They will often have nothing to do with your job.

( 8 ) When you have a job title promotion, it does not come with a salary increase. More work, no extra money.

( 9 ) There is a greater emphasis on hiring people without skills and training them rather than hiring employees who are experts in the field. This probably has a lot to do with how much employees cost.

Inconvénients

- Cult like atmosphere
- Forced to install company apps and leave reviews to pump up/mask bad ratings
- Breakfast and dinner hours are designed to have you work longer hours (breakfast ends 30 minutes before start time and dinner begins one hour after).
- Developers create low quality code to meet deadlines without plans to fix vulnerabilities or bugs.
- Weekly MANDATORY "asakai"(morning meeting) where the CEO boasts his accomplishments and travels. Slightly better now as you no longer need to stand to welcome the great leader when he arrives for his speech. Missing or being late for this will affect your performance reviews.
- Management is not adverse to change.
- Management likes enacting the appearance of change by shuffling things around and changing the names of departments.
- Finger pointing culture, who's to blame is more important than fixing the problem.
- Lower than average salaries.
- Mandatory stock options which are deducted from your bonus.
- Low chance of promotions and extremely small raises.
- Due to the high turn over rate, no one cares when an employee leaves.
- Career suicide for certain professions.

Inconvénients

Not good incentives, forced stock options instead of cash for bonuses, lots of circlejerking at asakai, bad promotion system that favors age vs skill.

Inconvénients

- Low salary
- Have to come early for morning session (Asakai) every Monday
- Evaluation system is unclear and unfair
- Some managers are scum

Inconvénients

- company treated you like a kindergarten students, not giving u any place to speak your opinion. For example asakai as an indicator for promotion. Once a week is enough but some people have to attend twice a week. You cannot get promotion if you skip because you'll be labelled as "lazy and not motivated", in fact a lot of people come there but sleep and not paying attention. So for the management, people who come but not paying attention and just sleep or play with devices deserve promotions compared to people who skip the meeting but actually working harder