Comment by throwaway86442 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway86442 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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