Walt Disney Company reviews

Disney has slowly eroded the high level of quality that was present back in the MLB / Bamtech days, it's very much a death by a thousand cuts. People are leaving in droves and the overall outlook is negative if things don't change for the better. Disney itself is not a "tech" company, so it treats all of its employees with the same kinds of standards. This means engineers working at DSS are given subpar total compensation, even though competitors (Netflix, Vimeo, etc.) pay hand over fist for good people. Disney tries to say the "company perks" it offers make up for this, such as park admission and % off Disney merch, but it's absolutely not. Upper management tries to spread messaging that DSS offers "competitive" compensation, which most engineers find laughable. The health insurance is terrible. Most people at the company publicly acknowledge this, but nothing is done about it. You will be paying out of pocket for a high deductible on the most basic things. There are no alternatives and many people opt to use their spouse's health / dental plans. Going from the legacy Bamtech health plan (which was amazing) to the terrible Disney one means you're getting a salary cut, since the cost is now being taken out of your checks every month. The Hulu merger has been an unmitigated disaster. Internal teams were merged between DSS and Hulu without a lot of consideration for programming languages & technologies used. After learning their titles, salaries and health benefits would be cut, many "Hulugans" have jumped ship accordingly. This means DSS people will be stuck maintaining software from Hulu with little to no help. Constant restructuring of organizations. This has been an issue since Disney acquired Bamtech and was exacerbated by the Hulu merger. Entire reporting structures will be redone, often multiple times within a few months, simply because high-up people keep leaving. Don't be surprised if your skip is an entirely different person each year. Frantic and borderline useless management. You should get used to vague and inconsistent messaging because that's what many TPMs provide. Priorities change and engineers are often left in the dark, wasting time building applications that no one wants or needs. Unreasonable deadlines are a common occurrence, often because someone high up just decided a feature needs to go out 3 months earlier than expected. This leads to burnout and high turnover. Plenty of engineers have realized they can coast and do the bare minimum. You will effectively be operating with less engineers on your team because no one in management cares enough to make them do their jobs. The internal DSS term for this is a "meeting engineer". You may see them contribute a small change or offer useless PR feedback ("LGTM" approvals on giant PRs from other engineers), but that's about it. In reality, they're just "resting and vesting" since Disney hardly ever fires anyone. The promotion process is entirely political and no one seems to know how to actually get one in a reasonable amount of time. I've seen people get promoted to senior engineer with only two years of experience, meanwhile others are stuck waiting for 5+ years at the mid level just to even be considered. DSS refuses to promote past L4 and only hires Principal Engineers externally. Upper management has no ideas or plans about how to actually enable people to grow into these upper roles. You have to leave the company or change teams if you want any role above L3 in a reasonable amount of time. Disney's new "solve" for this is to stack rank all engineers in an organization against each other just like Amazon, rather than having it be per team. People are leaving to avoid this encroaching disaster.

Budget: Disney like many large companies have lots of internal problems. The biggest one for Disney is that they keep trying to cut costs. If you work here, you'll get emails every quarter telling you "We're making more money than ever, everything's great...... thanks for all your hard work". Then you'll go to a company wide summit and be told, we want to cut costs across the company by 20%. This happens just about every year. They want more output from their employees than they are willing to pay for. Additionally, every project tries to low ball. Every estimate or conversation you have with someone prior to a project starting begins with, "So we want to...... oh by the way, we have very little money" Disney is notorious for taking the lowest bid on projects then complaining when things don't work out. This is why most vendors/mom and papa shops in the Burbank/Glendale refuse to work with Disney. Especially because no one holds to the schedule. Efforts will have 3 schedulers, yet no one is ever held accountable to those schedules. Management: The company is now run by very fiscally cheap individuals, which tends to mean that projects are underfunded and no one takes risks. The milking of beloved stories is very common. What could have been a stand alone film will regularly turn into a multi movie franchise. While I will admit sometimes it's not a bad thing, most the time it is. Middle management is rarely held accountable and "bosses" act more like friends than a boss. Very few people are reprimanded for messing up. My assumption is that everyone is just to politically correct. If someone screws up they should at least be told they screwed up, maybe not fired, but at least notified. What is considered constructive criticism tends to be viewed as railroading or picking someone out for other reasons. While I agree we shouldn't be afraid to fail, we do need to address a failure for what it is. Technology: If you work here, you'll most likely be told we are "cutting edge" and up to date. That's a complete lie. Be prepared to use 2-3 year outdated software, lack the tools you need to accomplish your job, and also be ready to work on Windows 7. Also this company is big into renting stuff like software licenses, and sometimes there are not enough for everyone. Coworkers: This company is divided into 3 main groups: Young people with no experience + no guidance : 25% (Rising every day) People who do the bare minimum because they can: 50% People who know their craft/job and strive to make the company better: 25% Sadly the people in the 3rd group have some of the least input, normally because they are making up for the other 75% of people who just come in for a paycheck and fly under the radar. These 25% of do'ers are also the people you will see late at night going above and beyond or in on the weekends. Most everyone else are entitled "I'm an Imagineer, I can do what I want" type of people. People regularly leave work early for no reason. If you work in an department without a strong manager people will abuse the system; it happens all over the company. Very regularly now 3pm rolls around on a Friday and the entire place is like a ghost town, people just leave. Also too many fan boys/girls. People who LOVE Disney make bad Imagineers, they're too focused on new stuff they want to fan about rather than doing their job. Hiring/Firing: This is probably the worst part about WDI. First off NO ONE gets fired. In the 5 years working here I have never seen/heard of someone getting legitimately fired. The general things that happen are, "They are no longer with the company" then you never hear anything about it again. People are asked (told) to resign, so they just close their mouth and walk away. Or you just never get called back. This is most likely the case, and this happens because fewer and fewer people even work for WDI. Disney now sub contracts just about every position, this allows them to dump people whenever they want by simply saying "We don't have any work right now, take a few weeks off and we'll call you", then they never do. This is the absolute worst part about WDI, contract workers (green badges) have next to no loyalty to the company. They know they are being paid less, and have to work with an outside temp agency, while fully knowing that they can be dropped at any time. This then leads to the unmotivated workforce that exists. Pay: Across the board it's low for the industry that we work in. Honestly how WDI/ Disney was labeled as the "Company people want to work for most" is beyond me. Everyone I talked to about those articles laughed and thought it was a joke. All that said, these things are all fixable with the right leadership and if we choose to stop putting profit margins over quality.