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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised they didn't look at Walt Disney for how to run a successful creative company. His ideas apply equally well to software as they do to the arts.

I've been watching the documentaries on Disney+, particularly The Imagineering Story (great doc BTW). They talk about the history of the creative side of Disneyland.

What you learn is that when they are simply given a budget and told "build" they thrive. When a CFO type gets involved with Disney, suddenly their output drops, because that CEO is asking what the ROI is for everything they do. A lot of what they do fails and has no ROI, and the people that work there start to worry about what their ROI will be before they start working.

When the CEO just says "We're going to spend X% on research, here is the budget" then they thrive again.

I think this is applicable to software. When an engineer isn't asked to think about the ROI ahead of time, they are left free to come up with novel innovations. But if they know they will be judged on ROI, they will take fewer risks.

This of course is all predicated on being a profitable company. You have to already have a good cashflow to have the freedom to say "just go create".

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Within the last 5-10 years, Disney outsourced entire technology divisions using the H1-B visa program and forced employees to train their replacements for their last 90 days or forgo severance.

A former Disney IT employee testified before Congress, at times crying while he recounted the experience of being let go and having to personally train his replacement.[0]

Whatever Walt Disney was doing back in the day doesn't seem to apply anymore, at least based on your description of what a successful creative company looks like. To me, this looks ruthless and manipulative.

0: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3038292/former-disney-...

One could argue that both you and the parent are not in disagreement.

The extreme success of Walt Disney as CEO has created a huge company that is an unfeeling monster predisposed to owning everything and chewing up human capital when needed.

And the management practices that allowed the creative culture to thrive weren't applied to tech and IT because the creatives were the "rockstars" at Disney and everyone else was the boring business side that supported them.

I think the takeaway for the tech side of things is what parts of our businesses are we not letting thrive because the engineers are the focus.

Or maybe it makes sense for the creatives to be the "rockstars" at Disney, and for the engineers to be the "rockstars" at software companies.

Companies should invest most heavily in the areas that are directly creating and discovering value, and outsource everything else to the greatest extent possible.

If everything is perfectly modular, sure, focus on your specialty and outsource everything else.

But if that's not the case ? What if understanding everything opens better possibilities ?

Well, that's why I qualified with "...to the greatest extent possible". It's not always possible, or practical. Just a good rule of thumb.

> What if understanding everything opens better possibilities ?

It does, but understanding is limited by time and money. In additon, the more humans you throw at a problem, the more complex solving adjacent problems becomes. A big org will not solve new challenges quickly or efficiently, this is why big orgs buy startups instead of having internal disruption programs.

Slowly turning into Five Nights at Freddie's...

Yeah I think this is common when the founders of a company either pass away or their memory fades. At some point, you have 2 or 3 generations of corporate management with little of the original entrepreneurial spirit and creative risk-taking.

I keep waiting for someone to say it, so I'll say it: Apple?

Disney died in 1966. Jobs died in 2011. Apple has a few decades yet.

This may be an understudied advantage of well-managed unionization of high-skilled industries. Many old European companies appear to have maintained a healthy corporate culture for more than a century.

While true and pretty awful, this is a bit of a non-sequitur from OP. Disney could still have had good creative practices that we can learn from, even if they do other terrible things.

I’d argue that has little to do with Disney as a corporation/organization and because humans are innately driven to create

Look around the web at the content being generated by people at home?

It used to take warehouse size buildings of people at tables sketching page after page of what were really long flipbooks, with huge machines churning to get it all together on reels.

Now 4-5 people, some nVidia cards can make something that artistically is miles beyond Steamboat Mickey and Snow White.

My kids don’t even know those movies exist. Precisely because of the points raised by OP you would look passed. Though I think you’d quickly see it’s mostly just people driven to create.

Disney is a draw to creatives that grew up on a lot of non-Disney created works Disney owns these days. A nice paycheck, not a source of creativity and inspiration.

How many more decades of Mickey, Marvel and Star Wars people doing the same old Mickey, Marvel and Star Wars looking things do we need? How creative.

Just a note: it sounds like you're conflating "artistically" and "technically" in the phrase

  [...] can make something that artistically is miles beyond Steamboat Mickey and Snow White.

Just because someone can make things that look better doesn't mean that they're better art, especially as that's almost entirely subjective.

Is IT a creative part of Disney though? Given that digital anything (until recently at least) was not really Disney's business and more of a support function, I don't see this comment as disagreeing with the parent one.

IT is strictly not the creative part of Disney.

It depends on how broadly IT is defined. IT includes everything from updating Windows across the org to potentially the software engineers working on Disney+. But yeah, I suspect that the IT people being discussed here are strictly an operational cost.

The question is "does Disney consider IT part of their creative advantage?"

Their actions bely their attitude, and the answer is "no".

Throwaway because I wouldn't be surprised if Disney retaliated because of this post.

As a person who recently joined the Disney org not by choice, I wouldn't wish Disney on my worst enemies. Seems like OP bought into Disney's propaganda hook, line, and sinker.

Take the CFO types example and dial that to 19. You can't even buy a sandwich without Disney corporate asking for the ROI of it. Want to use a different programming language? An OSS library? A SASS vendor? Please get approvals from legal and finance with ROI estimates. Nevermind the yearly dance to justify why engineers you already have should still stay on payroll. Contracts and employment are cancelled by default at the end of the year unless management makes a case on ROI for every head. Software projects to them are like movies, once it's "done", the people involved can kindly fuck right off.

This isn't just limited to the technology side, I have friends throughout the creative side in both film and parks divisions. Every hour of their time has to be accounted for and approved up the management chain, every project must be forecast with sufficient ROI before start, and will be cancelled without notice the moment it there's a hint of missing expectations.

Even getting a H1-B replacement is luxury that you have to fight for. H1-B is still more expensive than a contractor in a developing country under one of Disney's international divisions.

The magic of Disney is the boatloads of people who continue to _want_ to work for Disney despite all this.

This explains the recent Star Wars movies then. Well, possibly except one.

Belt tightening like that is usually the sign that the MBAs took over. This is fine up to a point except when they start running a financial services enterprise instead of ... whatever you'd call they had before. Animation media entertainment company?

I wonder when the rot set in. The creativity out of Disney is now matching Hollywood baseline and that has been dropping significantly. They're buying major franchies rather than creating them. I think this strategy is biting them. Too much financial analysis. They are losing the sharp creative edge.

Or is this my view, not based on insider knowledge, and completely inaccurate?

Oh, absolutely spot on. I remember tuning in to one of Disney's internal talks about how they make a movie, and they were so proud that they audited every movie scene to make sure they were min-maxing profitability on the scene. If the scene wasn't considered profitable enough (such as not enough product placement or focus on marketable characters), the scene would be cut (or even denied to be filmed if possible). They would do things like take all the scenes of a movie/script, critical or not, and stack rank them on profitability.

That explains Frozen II. My wife: "I don't understand why those scenes were left out. The movie would have made a lot more sense".

> Want to use a different programming language? An OSS library? A SASS vendor? Please get approvals from legal and finance with ROI estimates.

This is true of all of enterprise IT though. It's not due to "CFO types" getting involved, it's just part of operating at scale in a public company where your tool choices have an impact on long-term support and governance/controls. I don't begrudge technologists who are chafed by this, but it's inherent to the category and not particular to a single corporate entity.

It's more the severity and granularity at which they did this. It's definitely done by most enterprise IT orgs and there's good reason for it. Then there's what Disney does which blows past any level of reasonable.

Think: getting approvals for upsizing an AWS instance in accordance with AWS's recommendations on an instance class you're already using in an account already serving production. Adding a user to a per user billed SASS that's critical to the org (we had to seek approvals to add employees to Slack/Github/email, and they frequently got denied).

They will spend thousands of dollars in man hours to make sure you're not misusing a penny.

Found this comment really strange, I work at a far smaller company and not only would they ask that they'd be laughing at me the whole time while doing it. These aren't the sort of things even nimble companies take lightly and without a lot of discussion and review.

I've worked at companies where adopting an OSS library was an engineering decision, no purchasing and no management approval required.

These would be things that would have to be escalated to an SVP or above to be brought to an equivalent on the business side. In just about every company I've had experience with, these type of decisions stay within engineering and rarely need to involve lower executives.

I think the poster is referring to how Disney was run when Walt was at the helm. This doesn't mean it applies still today.

You are very cool for speaking out like this, so I'll follow your example. A company I worked at went through the Disney Accelerator [0] and had an absolutely horrendous time of it.

> The magic of Disney is the boatloads of people who continue to _want_ to work for Disney despite all this.

YES. This nails it. Disney's unique capability is its ability to churn out its "magical" content while conceiving of human capital in this dreadful way. They've figured out how to extract beauty and precision out of people while not having to return the favor in any meaningful way. They treat their janitor the same way they treat their janitor's mop.

They seem to conceive of their customers in the same sort of way. When people buy tickets to a showing of a Disney film in theaters, how many of their customers realize they are also having their eyes tracked by Disney? [1]

[0] https://disneyaccelerator.com/ [1] https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2016/12/08/how-disn...

>When people buy tickets to a showing of a Disney film in theaters, how many of their customers realize they are also having their eyes tracked by Disney?

Are they actually doing that anywhere? Your link just mentions that they patented it but doesn't say if it's been implemented.

> The magic of Disney is the boatloads of people who continue to _want_ to work for Disney despite all this.

This sounds similar to game development in a way. You get individuals who are really passionate about the brand/products and are willing to work in unfair conditions because of it.

The op was talking about Walt Disney the CEO. Not the company of today.

I know a bunch of software engineers that used to work for Disney, specifically in their online content divisions, and they universally reviled that place.

The usual bad software engineering practices with overbearing management, unrealistic deadlines, etc. but also below market pay and benefits, constant pressure to lower costs and outsource, and just generally a very cutthroat business environment.

Like other "cool" companies, they cash in on their brand cachet to treat employees badly, because they should be honored to work for such a company!

Whatever "magic" there is at Disney is all marketing.

Like any company, it’s much better working in the function that drives their competitive advantage—supply chain at walmart, marketing at coke, etc. They get the management attention and the budget. Working in software at Disney is going to be closer to working in software at your average company, which isn’t fantastic.

That's true of anything! Engineers optimize for a living. $ + labor ($$) = Output. It works when you grow, but gets expensive when growth slows. When the accountants come in, that's when the business is settling for (by choice or by market pressure) whatever they have, a little cheaper.

You see this with big capital assets in your personal life like houses and cars. Check out a cookie cutter subdivision new house with "builder spec" trimmings. The house is $600k, so they'll put in a granite countertop and shiny metal appliances to check the boxes and get the mortgage approved. But the light fixtures, toilets, etc are "builder grade" crap that are $14.99 at Home Depot! In lower price developments, the developers will skimp even more -- one near my house actually stripped and sold the topsoil! Imagine the corners cut inside if they were harvesting dirt for $.

Brian Chesky says, verbatim, if he could be anyone, it would be "Walt Disney." Okay, here's a CEO who read a bio on Walt Disney, he's been aspiring to be Walt Disney for a while, verbatim, at least since being some guy at 3DID.

Is AirBnb profitable? Then? Now? Is it just really about saying the right stuff? Are they creative and innovative? Do engineers like working there? So what if they say yes versus no? Is it really about ROI versus not ROI?

If Brian Chesky says, as he frequently does, that he learned a lot about management from Walt Disney, okay, he did. No dispute there.

But you're talking about Walt Disney, you are speculating about CEOs who should be copying him, I found one for you. Go ahead and analyze that, Brian Chesky and his company.

Management performance is, and always will be, mostly but not exclusively explained by "I was around in the right place at the right time to concentrate returns on capital in my hands."

For every S&P 500 exec there are 6 Russell 3000 execs, most of them receiving roughly the same elite educations, learn of the same trends, representing a great diversity of businesses. S&P 500 median CEO pay 2019Q1 was $12.2m and Russell 3000 was $2.7m. Russell 3000 CEOs might be at worst 10 percentage points "less creative" than S&P 500 CEOs, but no way they are 4.5x less creative.

It matters little what you do, if the pie is big and you eat most of it you will be the fattest. This is also incidentally VC view of management and corporate strategy.

> Russell 3000 CEOs might be at worst 10 percentage points "less creative" than S&P 500 CEOs, but no way they are 4.5x less creative.

How do you know that? How would you measure it?

Exactly. Creativity is incommensurable with developing best practices in an MBA program, going both ways - there are strong priors about the weights of factors in a model of performance, and creativity is basically impossible to measure.

> Management performance is, and always will be, mostly but not exclusively explained by "I was around in the right place at the right time to concentrate returns on capital in my hands."

I agree with this statement. [1] seems to agree with it as well, finding no correlation between CEO performance and quality of MBA program or past successes as CEO.

Obviously those aren't the only two factors to consider what makes a successful CEO, but it's what a lot of people in society think.

[1] https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1db3jy3201d38...

If you are 10% better at something than the second best in the world (that is, you are the best), than you are going to get paid way more than 10% more. Even if you're not the best, 10% better than someone else is going net you a disproportionate amount of money.

The reason for this is that skill tends to fall along a normal distribution. As you get better and better, the number of people as good as you starts to fall at an exponential rate.

But, for your example, I don't CEO compensation in many cases has much to do with the value you provide. CEOs of bigger companies usually get paid more not because they are better but because there is more money that they can personally capture, since the companies they run are large.

And then there are CEOs that are incredibly compensated, like Cook and Nadela because they truly are providing incredible value.

My friend at Pixar says they've slowly dismantled all the good things and benefits at Pixar after Disney bought them. Disney+ was built by the acquisition of BAMTech I believe. Maybe they have more autonomy like AWS does inside of Amazon.

D+ was literally built by BAMTech using the same tech that powers HBOGo and MLB streaming.

I think the Pixar thing has more to do with their management, namely John Lassater, moving south to head up Disney Animation, which did extremely well when he took over. Apparently they're doing even better under Jennifer Lee, who took over for him when he left/was ousted.

What you learn is that when they are simply given a budget and told "build" they thrive.

Or they end up with dozens of failed initiatives including three or four messenger apps being developed in parallel....

There are a lot of “smart people” (tm) when left to their own devices can’t create a product that anyone wants to save their lives.

When the CEO just says "We're going to spend X% on research, here is the budget" then they thrive again.

Or you end up with the Apple Technology Group that brought the world great products like OpenDoc, QuickDraw GX, Squeak, etc

"Pink" also brought us Dylan, Kaleida and Taligent. The old Mac team was pretty core to General Magic w/ IBM, Motorola and AT&T as partners. A lot of it was pretty good! But it suffered from a top-down "from on high" market introduction, and somehow never got traction. Which is too bad. (General Magic's mobile agent model also had some unfortunate dynamic security effects when an agent "traveled to a 'bad neighborhood' to compute on the results of a query, it wasn't allowed back into the gated-community good neighborhoods to deliver results. Large distributed systems got pretty unusable pretty fast. Unfortunate - because I liked the vision - and some super-smart people worked on it - and I was surprised they didn't catch that early on)

Isn’t that the point? “Smart People” had free reign and couldn’t ship.

They could ship ... but to whom? Marketing and market timing and product-market fit. (Ref: why didn't Smalltalk take over the world)

That still kind of making my point. The right product at the wrong time is the wrong product. Post 1997 Apple, there was Jobs, Cook, Schiller, Ive and Forstall among others that actually focused on shipping products instead of letting the “smart people” run wild.

All indications is that they balanced each other out as leaders.

True. But I don't think it is just that.

If I remember correct suppesedly Walt said:"I dont get (stomach) ulcers, I give them".

But I fully agree on the CFOs spoiling the show: remember Tom & Jerry? There are (I think) 114 (great) episodes. Then at their creative peak the whole animation team was dismanteled, since they calculated they can make more money with reruns than with new content. Later there was a low quality reboot, though.

Quote investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/04/ulcer/ sourced this to David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn. There are not attributions to Walt Disney uncovered. In an article about Disney https://jewishjournal.com/uncategorized/17567/ Stanley Gold, a former director at Disney, is quoted saying, "I don’t get ulcers – I give ulcers."

I don't believe that you remembered this correctly.

Thanks. This made me look up where I got it from. It seems from the orbituary in the LA Times: https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/archives/la-me-walt...

Thanks for the cite, I learned something new.

When the CEO just says "We're going to spend X% on research, here is the budget" then they thrive again.

Incidentally, this is how OpenAI wound up in a situation where they might die in a few years. (Aka be acquired by Microsoft.)

The logic works at Google, Facebook, and Disney. Not so much for startups without a revenue model.

That's why I said in my last sentence, that this is all predicated on already having positive cashflow.

Sorry, you’re right. I’ll read more carefully from now on.

Has it really worked at Google?

After all of these years they are still an ad company after years of trying to diversify.

I think it helped with their mind-share and broader lockin as a side effect.

Lock-in how? There is absolutely nothing Google offers outside of search where there are not better, more polished alternatives.

I’ll admit that ChromeBooks+GSuite is excellent for elementary and middle school though.

What is more polished than YouTube? For live content there is Twitch, but for edited amateur content YouTube is king.

YouTube wasn't created at Google.

There may be more polished products from other companies, but fact is they do sell many other services, which perhaps in aggregate turn good profit?

Like: Drive? Android (e.g. Play store)? Photos? YouTube? Google music?

It came out in the Oracle lawsuit that Android had only made Google $23 Billion in profit from its inception through mid 2016.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10810834/android-generate...

Google pays Apple a reported $8 Billion a year to be the default search engine for iOS. The profit from Android isn’t even enough to pay Apple.

YouTube is thought to be barely above break even and streaming music has horrible economics for the platform. Look at Spotify. Google Music is third behind Spotify and Apple.

Who pays for Google Photos? You get free unlimited good enough storage.

$23 BILLION over 3-4 years is a lot though! Since Apple isn't confirmed we can only speculate, and if you're right that's crazy.

What about Google cloud infrastructure and Sass that they deliver?

Possibly this and data across services is part of the package they sell to add companies? I don't think it's fair to compare between different companies. If they turn a good profit, then good for them.

Of course, not photo books are likely not selling at the scale of other products. Also, I meant Google One for storage, which I pay for, and you can buy photo books via Google Photos.

That’s $23 Billion over 6 years. Compare that to Apple in one quarter.

Actually now reports are that it’s up to $12 billion that Google pays Apple.

https://fortune.com/2018/09/29/google-apple-safari-search-en...

> What about Google cloud infrastructure and Sass that they deliver?

Around $10 billion in revenue and no telling how little in profit. GCP is a distance third.

> Of course, not photo books are likely not selling at the scale of other products. Also, I meant Google One for storage, which I pay for, and you can buy photo books via Google Photos.

If DropBox is number one by a large margin and can’t make a decent profit, how well do you think Google is doing? But that is also included in the $10 billion revenue for cloud.

How is this possible with 2.5 billion Android devices out there?

How many of those 2.5 billion phones are $30 phones sold in India? How much money are people in the US spending on Google services that are buying cheap phones from one of the MVNOs? The only method that Google makes money from Android are Google Play and ads. They have a rev share with OEMs for the ads.

People who are willing to spend money, overwhelmingly by iOS devices.

They do get a cut via google payment options in and out of the play store... but most apps people use are "free".

trying to move/migrate gigabytes of old emails that people stopped trying to sort/delete.

gsuite docs are another point.

Applications on one's phone that they are used to, not to mentioned all of the google service integrations that individually aren't too hard, but in aggregate much harder to work around.

I do think o365 is leaps and bounds better than gdocs, and outlook, even on android, is better than google's mail.

The last time I used Firefox for a few days, it wasn't bad, only a couple plugins I use regularly were missing, and that was difficult and evenually moved back to chrome.

I actually let myself fall into using my google or twitter logins across other sites... which was really bad when I was false-flagged on twitter, and after 5 days and 2 appeals, just deleted the "offending" post. I still say the person in question was a "fucking moron," and that it wasn't a call to action in any way shape or form.

And while I've started migrating some stuff away, the daily use isn't always easy.

Applications on one's phone that they are used to, not to mentioned all of the google service integrations that individually aren't too hard, but in aggregate much harder to work around.

Switching from Android to Google though is easy because no company serious about mobile makes Android only apps - not even Google.

Google also makes it easy to import and export documents from GSuite and Office.

As standalone software, Apple’s iWork equivalents are better than Google’s (yes their are web versions), not to mention like you said, O365 apps are miles better.

For collaboration, yeah GSuite is pretty good.

I just watched a series of videos by Technology Connections of the opposite playing out at RCA leading to the failure of the CED video system. They hired a bunch of smart people with various science/engineering degrees from prestigious universities, gave them essentially free reign to research things, and all they ended up doing was floundering around for decades, not wanting to develop anything to practicality because that's less interesting than new theoretical research and is less likely to get them more published papers. Seems like you certainly need at some degree of direction and limitations on research teams.

The problem there is more that they chose researchers to do engineering tasks. There are plenty of people inclined to build, just not those people.

Have seen those videos (quite good) and very familiar with the downfall of RCA, but not sure I agree with this take.

RCA basically set up an unworkable scenario and management did not heed the sunk cost fallacy to realize they were down the garden path. A stylus based cheaply made consumer electronic device with the technology at the time was pretty much impossible (and then of course by the time tech had advanced a stylus based system was totally moot). You could have hired manhattan project people and it wouldn’t have changed the physical/economic realities of what they were trying to do.

I got the impression everyone on the research team was more interested in publishing papers and going down obscure research than more immediately useful results. That kind of research has its value but I think you need more direction and a mix of more people that are more interested in making working stuff.

The ultimate example of this is Symbolics, the company behind the General Lisp machine. PhDs controlled the place and they ended up wasting gargantuan sums of money on building the "perfect" Lisp machine. It's still probably the most advanced OS ever designed and yet it failed miserably.

Like all things, balance is required. Engineers and finance people need to be on equal footing, to serve as a system of checks and balances. The when either group becomes to strong, it spells doom.

It's usually the finance types that win these struggles of power though (I'm not exactly sure why), so don't have as many examples of engineers destroying companies. Though, I think Google might be a good example of flaky engineers taking over and the bad that results from it.

The big financial fuckups at Symbolics were done by non-PhD "business people" that got into company later on, especially certain big inflexible contracts on real estate. This turned out to be a giant anchor when a proper war chest would have allowed finishing Ivory replacement and/or actually delivering full scope of OpenGenera (version 2.0 doesn't even cover what was planned for 1.0)

Interesting that you bring up Disney. My company had an organization go through Disney's training (I don't remember the name of it), and then later the rest of the company had similar training.

Some things have changed for the better since thing, but IT is still a cost center, which drives how projects are allocated. Until you get upper level management away from treating IT as a cost center, you can't really unlock the creative potential. Of course you have to have financial discipline, and one of the classic methods for that is cost based accounting.

If you aren't a software products or services company (engine of revenue), won't IT always be a cost center? If you are in IT at a bank, in retail, logistics, telecom, O&G, even trading, if what you produce isn't what you sell, then is IT not a cost center?

If you were the CEO at a retail giant, like Target, how would you account for IT's in/out budget and expectations?

I'm frankly amazed that Xerox PARC got away with being unaccountable rogues (with great unmonetized results!) for so long given that they didn't support the revenue side of the house one little bit. (Amazing place and time, though! And the director of the lab appears to have been a hell of a manager of unruly computer scientists!)

The very short answer is "value based accounting" - but that opens up so many questions that I don't have the answer to.

I can tell that cost based accounting is definitely part of the problem, but I can't really tell you how to get to somewhere better.

Counterpoint: 3D Realms. They made so much money off of Duke Nukem 3D that they never learned how to manage their business and burned all their money trying to make "the perfect sequel".

Valve software may be another example. Though with their shadow hierarchy I'm not sure the why is as clear cut.

Here’s a look at how and why Valve lost their way and hopefully an indication that they might be on the path back to making great games again (although I personally think their new focus has more to do with competition to Steam from Epic and GOG sharpening minds).

https://youtu.be/mHdrosltGJA

> When an engineer isn't asked to think about the ROI ahead of time, they are left free to come up with novel innovations.

In the cases I've seen, given free reign the engineers were happy to focus their effort on their personal interests, such as writing everything in a functional language or developing byzantine microservices + CI/CD.

Seems quite presumptuous to assume those choices were not adding value. Would you be able to tell if they were?

Most importantly, as mentioned in the article, engineering teams need (and want) clear business goals. There is a huge chasm between having an expected ROI vs having no targets at all.

The very complex and ambitious solutions they engineered, are currently a nightmare to maintain, as it's hard to hire people who can understand them (thanks to the technologies being very new and/or niche). Meanwhile, the requirements were bog standard and there's no demand to be scalable, to have high reliability etc. The system could probably be coded by a bunch of interns and grads in whatever language they fancy.

I can only speak to engineering, but in my experience it isn't that simple.

An example: SpaceX vs Blue Origin.

SpaceX was actually founded 2 years after Blue Origin, but it has a significant technology and business lead. Elon Musk set ambitious deadlines and micromanaged some of the technology goals from the start, requiring deliverable products to be able to stay in business. Whereas Bezos still just infuses up to a billion dollars of his own money a year, and as a result has a more relaxed atmosphere and slower progress. The result is that everyone knows what SpaceX is doing, but only people on HN have heard of Blue Origin.

Caveats: Elon Musk's far more active leadership may have also played a role, while Bezos left leadership to people who probably did not fully match Musk's creativity and drive.

Is Blue Origin as cutthroat and aggressive as Amazon about squeezing out performance out of its employees? SpaceX definitely is.

> and the people that work there start to worry about what their ROI will be before they start working.

This is it I think. People start basically self-censoring. The problem is that it's notoriously hard to predict ROI ahead of time. Many of the highest ROI projects look like long shots while many "sure thing" projects bomb.

You can see the result of this with Hollywood and its endless remakes, reboots, and comic book flicks. These are "sure things" and most do in fact make money, but the whole sector is sinking. I have zero excitement about movies anymore. All the interesting stuff is in serialized series and indie projects. I don't even pay attention to what movies are being released, and I'm not alone.

Is a documentary about Disney created by Disney being streamed on Disney+ really a great source?

Admittedly the docs on Disney+ about Disney are somewhat propaganda, some more obvious than not. But you can still extract kernels of truth.

That’s an idealized version of how Disney has worked for decades that doesn’t match reality.

Disney is all about the “wheelhouse” where the various parts of the company work together to monetize IP - movie distribution, merchandising, home video, parks, licensing, spin off cartoons, etc.

Apple doesn’t let “1000 flowers bloom” either. Everything is coordinated from software, hardware, design, marketing, operations, etc.

Apple is actually a perfect example. Most of their employees are directed in what they do, but they also have small groups of people who are just handed money and told to make something amazing. Usually it starts with an executive who has an idea, and is then given budget to spin up a team to execute that vision.

I would vouch for Imagineering Story as well. Great mix of technical stuff that's awesome from a nerd perspective, while entertaining for the non-techies too.

Yeah a friend wanted to work at Disney maybe 20-25 years ago and they don't treat their engineers very well.

Bob Iger's book - the ride of a lifetime - is also really good if you're interested in that!

i think for most software engineering, pursuing novel innovations is not the best thing to optimize. novelty can mean complexity and duplication. but i would totally agree with taking risk around giving people freedom to decide what to work on.

What's the documentary called?

The Imagineering Story

https://www.disneyplus.com/series/the-imagineering-story/6ry...

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