Pros
TL;DR: If you're in Japan and have worked at a "traditional" Japanese company, then Mercari will probably feel like paradise to you just from the benefits alone; but please keep in mind that the higher you go, the more traditional mindset you will come across, despite what it looks like from the outside. If you're trying to move from abroad and this is your Baby's First Job in Japan™, you most likely will be ok and will like working here, however if you currently working mid-career at a FAANG-level company then this will be a downgrade so I'd recommend trying to get transferred internally if your present company has a Japan office. Pros: - Great coworkers: I met some really amazing folks that are all contributing to the good parts of working in Mercari. It's them who are constantly trying to work together to improve the work environment and the products, and in this aspect I mostly had a positive experience. Your milage may vary depending on your team and direct manager though. - Good benefits for a Japanese company: flex time, casual dress code, an OK office, generous parental leave, vending machines, internal language classes and even sick leave which is rare in Japan; there’s more but it’d be better to check their site for up-to-date info. Post-COVID remote work was added, and things like free lunches and "club" events were cancelled. If you're coming from certain places like the Valley area or some parts of Europe these will not wow you or might even be underwhelming, but believe me, they're good for Japan. - An in-house translation and interpretation team: they help a lot in bridging the language gap by attending meetings to do live interpretation, translating documents and internal communications and so on. I honestly think Mercari would not have grown as much as they did and wouldn't have so many foreign employees if it wasn't for this team. - Visa support: currently because of Japan's border closures for COVID-19 this is not happening, but normally they will provide visa and relocation support if you're applying from abroad. - Diversity and inclusion: there’s a great D&I team that really is doing their best effort to help these causes at the company. Although things are changing nowadays, as I understand it's still rare to see a company in Japan where you can meet such a diverse group of people in terms of nationalities, as well as LGBTQ+ folks being able to be open about themselves without fear of alienation or retaliation from management or coworkers. - The team in charge of payroll, stocks and other financial matters is extremely helpful and always provides clear information and answers. - Slightly above average salary for software development in Japan. However if you look around and have the skills required, other places will pay better, and others places that were lagging behind in compensation are starting to catch up to at least the same level.
Cons
- Number one problem: the executive team are the worst group of people I have had the misfortune of working for; arrogant, dishonest, incompetent, immature, abusive and unapologetically nepotistic. They have absolutely no leadership skills and only boss people around to get what they want, despite presenting themselves to the media like the Japanese Steve Jobs and talk about the company as the mosty progresive and amazing thing to happen to Japan since sashimi. If you've ever watched the show Silicon Valley, think of a group of Gavin Belsons, and the VPs and directors are the yes-men that follow him around all day. - To explain what I mean, this are some of the things that happened to me or heard firsthand accounts of: people being yelled at both in open spaces and in private, people being power harassed not just in Mercari but at other companies after employees had left and an exec called a favor in, people being gaslighted, people having their salary reduced after having had excelent performance but because their superiors don't agree with something they have done, managers arbitrarily blocking people's requests for team changes, people being denied promotions after good evaluations and ignoring the employees request for their reasons, upper management showing obvious favouritism to their "hero" and "10x" developer friends that they brought from previous companies, people's property being destroyed, and the list goes on, you get the gist. Upper management (directors up to execs) is extremely toxic and you should do your best to stay as far away from them as possible. - People in management positions who should not be in them: since seniority doesn't equal years of proven work and demonstrable skills but instead years of being in the company, period, some folks in management were just forced into their position despite lacking basic management, interpersonal and social skills. For example my manager once started staring into space and ignoring me as I was talking in front of them, as if I was some sort of velociraptor that wouldn't see them if they stayed still, all because I had given valid criticism of problems that we were facing in the project. On the same vein other managers have stormed out of meetings when something they disagree to was said. This of course affects their team but they will still put the blame for any problem on their report. This HAS improved a bit because the high turnover rate has resulted in some good managers to be hired or existing members who did want to manage finally stepping up to the plate. - No escalation mechanism: as you read these you might wonder why some of these things are not reported but that's the thing, there's no way to do it. The ones abusing and harassing employees ARE the ones in charge and although people having gone to HR to attempt to have something done, they ended up being thrown under the bus instead of helped. HR is there only to protect their bosses and will not care a bit about you or of any employee turnover rate that this causes. - Meaningless values: despite making the entire evaluation process revolve around the so-called company "values", they are ignored in the upper echelons. No professionalism (Be a Pro), adversity to taking risks (Go Bold), and deforming All for One into everyone working for the sake of profits only. I have seen plenty of coworkers who do exhibit these values, but at most they're just for PR. - An anemic career path: if you wish to specialize as an IC, forget about it. The only options are to move to tech lead, which at Mercari is a person who does the the EM's job as well while getting paid less, then to EM and possibly to manager of managers if you're a good boi that pleases the powers above. - Pathetic Scrum rollout: when the company moved to Agile, despite people with years of experience and certifications in it, everyone was ignored and instead the task of implementing it was given to one of the exec favorites. The result, like opening a KFC without having bought any chicken, was a mess with no scrum masters, no product owners, inconsistent ceremonies, no training and only a spreadsheet being provided to magically do Scrum. This person also refused to train the business side on how Agile works, so despite the development teams' efforts to get themselves up and running, PMs would still decide deadlines with no engineering input and would still interrupt sprints to shove tasks in at their own convenience. - An overpowered business side: because of upper management's low technical level and high business preference, and VPs/heads of Product also being part of that inner circle, the business side still has a lot of power despite being run in a very amateur way. If you have incompetent people giving decisions, and inexperienced people (fresh grads, poorly trained people, folks from different career paths) trying to implement those decisions, then you end up with basically the entire product being managed through guesswork and dumb luck. PMs will just randomly throw ideas at teams to have them developed, but then at the slightest sign of not being the extreme success they expect, will immediately have the code code ripped out wasting months of people's work. To be fair there ARE some PMs who are doing their best efforts to make proposals based on data and analysis while cooperating with the dev teams, but overall the app was MacGyver'd into what it is today. - No clear direction or long-term plans: every quarter leadership makes a big show of doing OKR meetings and while this is not bad in itself, the issue is that the company's direction radically changes direction every three months at their whim, and it's impossible to get a sense of where they actually they want the company to go on the long term. - Despite the D&I' team's efforts at the employee level, the executive as mentioned before the executive level is an invite-only club and despite demands for improving diversity and empty promises to do so, upper management is still made up almost exclusively of Japanese men in their 40s. Only recently was a woman finally appointed to an executive position, but this is after being a company for 8 YEARS and having a big female user base. - Language barrier: despite having the translation and interpretation team that I mentioned in the pros, there's still a lot of overhead that comes from having to deal with two different languages. At some point there was a Rakuten-like attempt at going English-first but that upset some of the Japanese employees, and resources that were being put into Japanese lessons for foreign employees were supposed to go into English learning but it feels like the effort just disappeared. If you're in an english-majority team things will be mostly ok, but a lot of business-side documentation is still written in Japanese and because of the translators being stretched thin, you'll have to throw things into Google Translate to try to figure out what you're supposed to do. I think this is an important problem but unfortunately I see no easy or fair solution, so if you're coming from abroad, try to learn at least the basics of the language.