Crunchyroll reviews

- Politics: the two legacy organizations (Funimation and Crunchyroll) do not mesh well, nor do they trust each other. The recent layoffs were largely clearing the decks of senior legacy Crunchyroll staff and in many cases had little to do with the productivity or contributions of the people affected. - Brain drain: many of the most experienced developers and capable leaders have left over the last three years, either due to burnout caused by frustration with the organization's seeming inability to act decisively or because their skills and contributions were not adequately recognized. - Incoherent focus: the leadership (or perhaps Sony) seem dissatisfied with the state of the business, despite consistent, strong subscriber growth (and almost always hitting growth targets). There is some idea of a 360 business strategy, but sometimes that comes at the cost of solidfying the core user experience. - Many of the engineering managers are software engineers who were promoted into management, and have swapped being talented developers for mediocre managers. - Many of the directors are not capable of effectively managing managers. - The company is globally distributed but relies on synchronous communication and planning to get things done. Decisions are almost always made in meetings. Hope you like Zoom! Depending on your role and location, working hours can be awkward. - The technical organization's mastery of its own platform is inconsistent, and stability and resiliency for customers suffers as a result. - Some of the engineering teams are understaffed (due to difficulty in hiring rather than lack of budget) and some of them are stuck in a persistent malaise. - Information is poorly distributed through the company, leading to contention between different parts of the organization and wasted effort.

The people who were too incompetent to make a functioning anime streaming app (Funimation) are in charge now. The cool and laidback work culture that made Crunchyroll a desirable place to work is long gone. The merger destroyed what could've been a respectable place to build a career. Every position is a dead end, or has negative mobility though a lack of cost-of-living raises that most respectable employers give to most dead end employees. You'll experience the same toxic, soul sucking, on-call work culture that investment bankers do minus the lucrative pay, benefits, or prestige. I can't tell you how many times I got a work call while I was dead asleep, or how many nights of my life were constantly interrupted by Slack DMs. This is all in service of long term projects that amount to nothing by the way. Working under the Crunchyroll/Funimation merger is analogous to working at GameStop. Your passion and ambition is something to be exploited, not nurtured. You can expect to work long hours, have no career path, and low pay. But hey, at least they let you rummage through the dollar toy bin before it all goes to the incinerator.