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Good work-life balance; lots of bureaucracy

Senior Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Disney for 2 years
May 30, 2020
New York, New York
4.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Free passes into the parks (subject to blackout dates).

Company-wide priority is work-life balance.

Lots of opportunities to be promoted within the company.

Cons

Even with a distributed workforce, remote employees are second-class citizens, and there is a bias by some managers who seem to think remote employees cannot be as effective as in-person employees. (I hope the pandemic will change that).

Lots of bureaucracy; for example, approval is needed for just about anything public you do, such as presenting at a local user group or interacting on social media about anything Disney-related.

Contributing public posts to the company blog is a nightmare process that could take many months for approval.

As part of your year-end review, you have to prove you have taken time to do personal development. The work schedule is so booked there is no time to do that on the clock.

Every single development team is built as a silo, meaning we all write our own deployment scripts and manage our own servers, which means a lot of teams are doing a lot of duplicate work, and doing it badly.

Advice to Management

Instead of forcing everyone to be a full-stack developer, let some people specialize in things such as UI, backend, or DevOps.

Foster more team collaboration so we aren't all building the same stuff.

Remember the remote folks when you have in-office celebrations or swag.

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