Crunchyroll reviews

Funimation "leadership" creates a toxic environment based on extreme dictatorship principles. No one is allowed to speak. Anonymous Q&A is no longer a thing during All Staff meetings and everyone asking valid questions to leadership is being closely monitored and fired. After the recent layoff of ~80 people, "leadership" could not even provide justification to people why the layoff is taking place. Managers have not been aware and one day some managers even lost all of the team members, remaining a single person in the department. Everyone is afraid to speak now and fear culture is working. No transparency, and no career opportunities, this place is cursed. Sony does nothing (at least now) and unclear whether they even know what is happening inside Crunchyroll.

- 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.