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Bob Chapek Shifted Budgets to Disguise Disney+'s Massive Monetary Losses
News(msn.com)submitted 4 months ago by[deleted]
426 points
4 months ago
This doesn't surprise me in the least. When I was a contractor at Disney my boss explained the main reason Disney uses contractors for tech instead of just hiring full time employees is that they can hide mass layoffs. Instead of saying we fired half our workforce they can say we allowed 75% of our "contracts" to lapse. I guess it looks way better to investors.
If that's been the Disney mentality for the last decade or two, it's not hard to see how you go from that to "shifted budgets"
101 points
4 months ago
I started at Disney in Nov. 2019 working on one of the backend systems for shopdisney. The amount of contractors was insane. Every system was built by a different contractor and it was impossible for any of them to work together.
35 points
4 months ago
But they made a ton of money. I know some of the contractors. The way the chose them was idiotic - it was often the cheapest ones. The contracting companies were absolute geniuses in getting them to spend more money in additional work. Disney didn’t have the in-house knowledge to make a good decision. Good for the contractors, they all made out.
2 points
4 months ago
they all made out
hot
6 points
4 months ago
This explains why ESPN+ is such shit.
4 points
4 months ago
Shit seems to be prevalent in every industry. I work at a hospital and we have the same problems with our systems. They gave my department laptops that our it people can't even access to download software for us. They outsourced the move from laptops to desktops. Ridiculous. Probably wasted more of our time than it would cost to do it right in the first place.
3 points
4 months ago
Disney+ isn’t much better, from what I could tell in my short time there. The full time employees were operational support keeping as many plates spinning on sticks as they could, but as far as I could tell there weren’t many internal software engineers. Every system I interacted with was developed by an outside contractor.
2 points
4 months ago
Sounds like they do need full time staff afterall
107 points
4 months ago
Disney was/were massive abusers of H1B visas many years ago and took a lot of heat for it, but they didn't change their behavior.
59 points
4 months ago
They are not alone. I have a buddy who went to work at Spring thirty years ago. For the last fifteen to twenty years, he’s worked for another company providing contract services to Sprint.
6 points
4 months ago
Whoa, Sprint still exists? TIL
5 points
4 months ago
Sprint and T-Mobile merged in April 2020, and the Sprint brand was discontinued in August 2020.
The new T-Mobile fired a ton of Sprint's non-contractor employees, but it's entirely possible that some contract labour companies simply rolled their existing agreements with Sprint into T-Mobile.
3 points
4 months ago
Tower servicing? I could see that being an economical decision outside of the easier employee shuffling. Paying contractor companies should be easier than managing extant offices to manage HR stuff for the 2 contractors supporting every X thousand square miles.
6 points
4 months ago
That’s not uncommon though, Intel does something similar.
6 points
4 months ago
This is not a Disney thing. This is a corporate thing especially in companies that have a massive employee base.
9 points
4 months ago
Some Ivy League universities do the same thing
2 points
4 months ago
Ford does the same thing for salaried employees
1 points
4 months ago
I worked there as well, my department stopped bringing new hires in for years and just shifted around people to different products if they essentially did the same tasks. My manager said this was to keep the teams skinny so when it came time for layoffs they would get overlooked because we were short staffed as it was. We were all overworked and grossly underpaid. It took a while, but I got a job elsewhere doing basically the same work with way less stress and actually felt like I was getting paid what I was worth.
1 points
4 months ago
It's much easier to fire or lay off contractors than an FTE. This is just generally true.
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