And the second edition of Inside the Industry is live! Once again, every first Friday of the month people working in the industry get to share just about whatever they like, as long as it has something to do with the industry. Since this is again still an inaugural feature, any feedback on Inside the Industry would be great, so if you have any suggestions or comments send an email over to organizationasg at gmail dot com.
So let’s get to it! Last month I let Lillian, a former TOKYOPOP editor, speak out about her time being so close to the manga industry, and now, as a freelancer, being mostly out of the limelight. In another way, the person you’re going to be reading today mostly is out of the limelight, since he’s a software engineer. But for Evan Minto, that’s one of the things he’s wanted to do out of college, and he gets to do so for Crunchyroll, who you all might know about. So he’ll tell you a bit how he even was able to work at Crunchyroll, the perks, and a bit about the DDoS attack that occurred a few months ago. – Justin
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in the following article are solely those of the author, and do not necessarily represent Crunchyroll, its employees, or its partners.
Granted, my path to the industry was a little strange. My first step was going from a passive fan to a blogger, writing news, reviews, and industry commentary on my blog Ani-Gamers in high school. In college I started freelancing for Otaku USA Magazine as a reviewer, and simultaneously worked as the Public Relations Coordinator for Genericon, my college anime/sci-fi convention that I would eventually lead as Convention Chair.
(All of these, by the way, are alternative ways of being a part of the industry, whether as a commentator or critic, or as the facilitator of the events that form the backbone of American anime fandom.)
So, by the time I graduated college, I was already far too deep into this quagmire of anime fandom, writing reviews, organizing conventions, and generally thinking more about Japanese cartoons on a daily basis than any human being probably should. I was desperately searching for a job that could combine my two majors, computer science and animation, into a satisfying hybrid of technology and art, but figured my skillset wasn’t useful in the anime industry. One day I was watching anime on Crunchyroll in between sending resumes (as you do) when it finally hit me. “Wait, Crunchyroll is a website. They must need programmers!” I clicked the Jobs page link, emailed my CR press contact (who I met through our coverage at Ani-Gamers) for a recommendation, and started off an interview process that eventually landed me a job in CR’s San Francisco office.
You may have heard stories from our lovable brand management team at conventions, but despite working in the same office, their day-to-day experiences are significantly different from those of my team, which is in charge of the code for the whole Crunchyroll website and general frontend web development (that’s the visual stuff, not the inner guts of the application) for other projects, such as Korean drama sister site SoompiTV. Whereas a brand manager’s job is to care deeply about the anime itself — which ones we license, how popular they are, which ones to promote — our job is to make sure the site works as the designers intended. Major front-facing features such as the video player, the queue, and the Premium signup process are our bread and butter, and in general our developers care more about these features from a technical perspective than a marketing one.
But not everybody at Crunchyroll likes anime either. Some of our coworkers joined us because they were interested in the work itself, whether it’s development, design, or marketing. The truth is, only certain departments require their employees to be anime fans — everybody else can still contribute meaningfully by simply solving the problems that they’re good at solving.
One of the coolest parts of working at an anime company, however, is that, despite anime fandom not being a requirement, we’re still surrounded by fans every day, and from all different departments. I know a designer with Xenosaga figures all over her desk, an HR generalist who runs an in-office anime club, a developer who attended the holiday party in cosplay, and a content manager who married a boat in KanColle (complete with a wedding ceremony at the office). We’ve even converted some non-fans in the office, like the time I convinced one of our marketing heads to watch Inferno Cop (he loved it).
Plus, for people like me with experience and interest in the more “anime industry” stuff at the company, it’s often possible to branch out and contribute in alternative ways. In addition to coding for Crunchyroll, I also appear at conventions to interact with fans, participate in events at our booth, and co-host industry panels. I’ve had chances to informally help out with licensing and marketing as well, sifting through potential manga titles with Danika (our manga brand manager) and writing copy for some of our promotional videos.
We’ve recently started to put more of a focus on this part of the company at conventions, with a new panel called “Working in the Anime Industry.” Hosted by a cross-section of employees including brand managers, product managers and software developers, the panel gives fans a candid view into the day-to-day work of an anime company, not just from the front-facing people, but also the many fans and non-fans behind the scenes who make Crunchyroll what it is.
Speaking of looking behind the scenes, it’s worth commending our Operations team, which tends to be invisible to users, on their recent work. Whereas my job is to build new things and make sure they look and work right, their job is to keep the entire site online and performing to the best of its ability. When Crunchyroll was hit by a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack over the holidays, the Ops team worked around the clock — some of them during their days off — to implement fixes that would bring the site back to life and keep it there. They tell me that throughout the process what they felt wasn’t just a sense of personal anger at being forced to do extra work, but a “righteous anger” that someone out there was willing to keep fans from watching their anime. After all, many of them are anime fans as well. Once things settled down, one of our developers walked down to the desk of the Ops manager and wordlessly dropped two bottles of single-malt whiskey on his desk. That sort of stuff reminds me that we don’t just do this because we collect a paycheck, but because we care about the product we provide and the fans who use it.
The typical anime industry motto when overzealous fans imagine the industry as a magical place of 24/7 Japanese cartoons is “it’s still a job.” That’s absolutely true, in that there’s still work to be done, and sometimes that work is really hard, but a year in the industry has yet to make me jaded about the positive influence of working alongside passionate people to put out stuff that you care about. I do programming work that I find interesting and satisfying, but what keeps me energized is the fact that I do it in an industry I love.
