Toxic Politics, Corporate Working Culture, and Burnout
Pros
- Leader in anime: If you're an anime fan, there's no other real company to work for. Lots of fun events and access to merch or early releases of anime. The San Francisco office is anime heaven and a unique space to work in. The toilets are even equipped. Japanese Toto bidets in addition to other amazing conference rooms. Being surrounded by other passionate anime fans who are striving to serve fans. - Benefits: The perks were also great. As a manager, I had access to career coaching. There's access to mental health resources. Free lunches. Crunchyroll store discount. Crunchyroll Premium access for free. There are also benefits and discounts offered to Sony products as an employee of Sony. Tech company benefits. During the time I worked there, Crunchyroll had Summer Fridays for 3 months of the summer which was great. Especially since summer is a slower content season for anime releases. - Compensation: Also seems market-based and fair based on the roles and responsibility
Cons
- Corporate bureaucracy: Post-Sony acquisition, so many more processes were introduced which increased the administrative load. More than half of my job became filling in various documents and submitting scenarios as opposed to doing actual work. This significantly slowed down projects. - Toxic politics: Many decisions are made based simply on who's close to leadership and has a good relationship with their manager. Especially since leadership is completely turned over to Funimation-legacy leaders, Funimation team members seem to be favored for promotion opportunities even if the impact of work hasn't been proven. - Lack of transparency: Since Sony acquired Crunchyroll, many leaders on the Funimation-legacy team treat knowledge as a currency and a way to yield power. My manager would have regular direct messages or meetings with other team members without including me. Because of this, I learned about the information for a project I'm working on last minute, preventing me from succeeding. I asked multiple times to meet with members of the Finance team but these meetings were continually punted by my VP and manager. It was frustrating that they continued to gate-keep relationships that would have helped me. - Regular burnout - Finally, I saw many team members regularly burning out of their jobs and roles (me included). I do feel that Crunchyroll's culture preys on the passion of anime fans who work for them to continue squeezing more work out of employees while withholding resources. There were a lot of "toxic positivity" undertones in talking points from leadership which made me felt gaslit in voicing any concerns.
