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Comment by newfangle | Hacker News Reader

I believe disney has every advantage in the streaming wars so i decided to see if they have any open dev positions and i also decided to check what reviews of working there were like. Seems like Disney does not have an engineering culture and software engineers are at the bottom of the totem pole.

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OP on the thread and actually I'm a former disney dev for disneyworld.com. It's a sweat shop. They had me working 100 hours a week the first 4 months I was there. They would order me food so I wouldnt have to leave my desk. Many times I slept under it.

Then I had 6 months of pretty normal hours working on maintenance, then I went back on another project and they had me working 60 - 80 hours (with some 40 and some 100 sprinkled in) for 18 months straight before we finished the project and I bailed.

Great resume builder but be prepared to put in hours.

> Great resume builder

Compared to any big 4 or FAANG though? You can work at MS and pull 40 hour weeks or AMZN/FB with 60. Pays better, looks better.

You can easily work 40 at tons of Amazon teams. AWS and parts of retail have the "crack the whip" culture, but it's not as bad as people think it is.

> They would order me food so I wouldnt have to leave my desk. Many times I slept under it.

Is this work culture the norm in the US? I audibly said "wtf" just now, sitting at my work desk.

I often see these kind of bizarre reports about destructive US work culture. I would flat out refuse and probably get fired real quick.

It's a bad way to run a company, and if this is how they plan to run Disney+, it's going to be a disaster.

The US has workers who, on average, work longer hours than anywhere else in the world. Salaries, esp. in STEM, and esp. on the mid-to-high-end, are also wayyy higher than anywhere else.

If you want to make that fat US developer salary be ready to put in the work. Presumably Disney has the money to throw at you via salary... but they're going to get their money's worth.

But aren't these high salaries spent on high living costs as well? Presumably, the places where you make a lot of dev money are also expensive to live at, no?

No, it is absolutely not the norm.

This kind of makes sense. It isn't their competency. I think it's general advice to never work in a role at a company where that's not their core competency. E.g., engineers are praised at places like Google, etc. Engineers working in entertainment (e.g, Disney) or health care (e.g, Epic Systems) are not as well treated.

At Google, engineers make money (lots of asterisks with that statement but it's generally true). At Disney, engineers are just another cost.

I agree with Disney, but what does Epic do other than build software?

presales, consulting, and support.

Yes - for the software they (disclaimer: we) build. We don't provide healthcare. The comparison with Disney seems misleading.

Disney has always been about technology. From the animatronics and the other attractions at the theme parks to the engineers at Pixar and LucasFilms.

As I posted above, they own BAMTech, one of the most well respected companies in the streaming infrastructure space.

Building for scale is not hard for good engineers, building for rapid, reliable scale from day one is hard. No one knows how to do it. Building for scale is always about patching holes while you grow slowly.

Even Google doesn’t do big band released like Disney tried to do. They keep things in beta, start off with a limited number of invitations until they work all of the kinks out.

Netflix didn’t become popular overnight. They had time to scale out slowly and on different devices.

>> Disney has always been about technology.

Um.. have you ever worked at Disney? It's a great company but having worked there I wouldn't describe it that way.

>> From .. the engineers at Pixar and LucasFilms.

Two visionary companies, staffed by many ex-Disney employees and bought by after their technical innovations were completely mature.

Disney is an amazing company that I respect but having worked there I would say that modern Disney is about brands and family entertainment and they figure out technology when they have to.

and they figure out technology when they have to.

How is that different than any other company? When you do otherwise, you end up with Google that just throws a lot of stuff up against the wall and comparatively little sticks or the pre-Jobs 2.0 Apple with the “Advance Technology Group” that couldn’t ship a product if their life depended on it.

Technology from the standpoint of media creation is different than building a resilient network for content delivery.

Disney even had an open source 3d engine! Don't know how that happened though!

They do however treat their creative department very well. Disney is just as IP focused as any tech company. Software has simply never been as important as the story, characters, etc. And honestly they’re doing really well so it’s hard to argue their priorities are wrong.

PS: I have always disliked how they operate, but my sister’s working there making movies. So, I try to keep an open mind.

Disney is no different than any other company as far as how they treat their front line people. They treat their creative people well but they outsource the special effects and much of the non computer animation out to the lowest bidder.

All of the big tech companies with hardware sales and grunt work do the same.

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