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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

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-...

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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.

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".

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

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