Crunchyroll reviews

Crunchyroll has had a really hard time with growth in the last year or so. The company has tried to put many (many, many) plans in place in a variety of areas of the company with fairly poor adoption. There is a relatively new product management group, which is a mix of seasoned veterans and people who have been doing this role for less than a year due to migrating from other areas of the company. This has lead to a very sloppy attempt at agile development and many communication woes between stakeholders of various projects. There's also not enough project managers to focus on many pieces of work so they can be spread pretty thin, typically leaving some projects in the dark. The company recently hired a new CEO and CTO, effectively replacing much of the leadership that was already in the company and stepped on a the toes of many people who had been here for a long time. With the new CEO coming on board, the culture of the company is effectively shifting to be a mini-Google, but not necessarily in a good way. It's like trying to make a mid-size startup work like an arm of a giant company. The company is in dire need of more seniority and leadership in most departments, but entirely unaware of how to go about acquiring it. Given that it's grown so much in the last year or so, no lessons were learned along the way for scaling in a reasonable manner. Many new hires were promised stock options at hire but not granted any initial accrual for over a year! On that same note, it took over 8 months to complete a "leveling" structure which effectively pushed everyone into bands that allow the new CEO and leadership to hire in brand new VP level leadership.

At least when it was owned by Warner, it was still pretty hands-off. But after the Funimation merge, every business decision, including why we’re abandoning previous long-term priorities for short-term gains, why people are being laid-off, etc. - it all has a go-to explanation now: “unification”. This excuse has been the reason for two reorgs so far, plus a third expected in the coming month. Layoffs out of the blue came yesterday, and people were let go who should absolutely not have been - some long-time employees who were with the company for years in critical positions with tons of legacy knowledge, some just newly hired. Leadership is even explicitly not blaming the timing on the market. Given the goals set for 2025, it’s absurd to go about things this way. The company was very successful during the pandemic - where did they invest those gains? Certainly not in hiring, certainly not in infrastructure, certainly not in feature dev. Moreso than anything, it feels like they’re laying off people who spoke out against decisions - though how they did that, who knows? There’s no openness in monthly all-staff meetings, and Q&A is locked down. Very different from pre-covid Crunchyroll. And one last frustration: for a cultural performance, in the SF office, they brought uniformed cops on-site to perform, no notice given to the org. Just consistently tone-deaf, not just this, but also especially every time they praise their hybrid model.