Disney

Overall a decent company to work at, but nothing like it used to be. You may get to work on services that impact Disney+ directly. Depending on your team, you may have a relatively high amount of autonomy to make important technical decisions. There are plenty of smart coworkers to learn best practices from as well. Decent matching on 401k contributions and stock granted/vested per year.

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 three 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.

Fire engineers & managers that don't do their jobs.

Give employees actually decent healthcare options.

Pay engineers what they're worth and promote them accordingly.

All of these are pretty basic expectations for "tech" companies, which DSS can't seem to decide if it is one or not.