Almost a black company - Applications Engineer bei Rakuten: Mitarbeiterbewertung

Pay is lower than industry, and the low pay raise is an insult. Oh, who says your pay will always rise instead of falling? All employees have a quota for selling SIM cards. New joiners are constantly pressured to meet the quota. The company has been losing money for maybe 6 years, largely because of their mobile carrier business. Working from home is allowed only 1 day. CEO said this in one of his grand and vague speech: "I hate work-life balance". CEO keeps pushing AI for everything, no matter if you need it. He invented another misspelled word called AI-nization. Insane idolism. There is a morning meeting every Monday to read the CEO's book and listen to him talking about his grand and vague ideas for 30 minutes. There is a Q&A session in the end where some new grad asks some grand and vague questions, followed by more of his grand and vague ideas. New joiners even need to join a meeting every day to study his book. Feels like a cult. Heavy bureaucracy. You spend most of your time on paperwork, chasing approvals and other processes. A simple feature that takes 2 weeks to implement can drag for 2 months just in pre-production. No one wants to take ownership. People go to work to look after a burden rather than growing a product. "Super Sale" 4 times a year plus heavy bureaucracy makes it impossible for agile development. Waterfall is the only way. They prefer no change over innovation. Overall, the whole business culture is more salesperson mindset than IT. CEO was never an engineer, so he doesn't really know about much in technology, but well we all have to listen to him. The business is a joke compared to Amazon, his imaginary rival. All things considered, if my pay were doubled, I probably would not have cared about any of this.