[seldonPlan]

I feel like this article is a bit sensationalist and lacks the other side of the story. I work for Disney IT, in the actual building pictured in the article. The layoffs in question were the result of a restructuring where many departments were shuffled and changed with an emphasis on new development work. Many employee's were reassigned and transferred, along with those employee's whose roles were removed. My understanding was that the purpose of the restructuring was to put more new development in the hands of actual company employee's with ongoing sustainment work shifted to the hands of contracted employee's. Many of the roles that were shifted to contractors included responsibilities for 24/7 call support and working general trouble tickets.

I cant really speak to the visa status of the contracted employees (I know that seems to be a lot of the focus of the comments in this thread). I do know that many of the people that were impacted by this restructuring found roles in other parts of the organization (which was mentioned in the article), many doing active development work on other projects. These employees included a wide range of ages and experience levels, so I really don't buy that agism was part of this decision. I do not know what those employees ended up making in the new roles, but I do have years of experience with the HR policies of this company and would be very surprised if those employees weren't making at or near their previous levels. With that said I really don't feel there were significant financial gains to be had by shifting those 250 roles around. I recently saw some internal figures showing that the number of non-contractor Disney IT employees has actually gone up slightly in the past year. This could be creative accounting statistics or it could be that there truly is not some scheme to replace knowledgeable local employees with less knowledgeable out-sourced employees as the article suggests. My experience and gut says the latter is more likely than the former, but that is my own opinion. I wont speculate on the disposition of the employees that are truly displaced and out of a job as a result of this restructuring, but I do feel for them, and hope for the best for them.

I've been in my IT role with Disney for only a few years (I have many more years in non-IT roles), but for me, I like the emphasis on actual development, and less on ongoing sustainment. I personally don't feel like my role or those around me are at risk of being replaced by an out-sourced team. I also work closely with some of the "managed services" folks, and appreciate that they will be handling the monitoring and calls in the wee hours while I get to create cool stuff during the day.

Disclaimer: I by no means speak for Disney or it's IT department. This is all my personal observation and opinions.

[gaius]

I personally don't feel like my role or those around me are at risk of being replaced by an out-sourced team

Neither did they. Good luck.

[seldonPlan]

Actually I would hope they did feel their roles might be at risk given they had 90 days notice for the actual layoff plus many prior notifications in the months leading up to those last 90 days about the change in direction the department was taking.

I really don't understand the tone in comments from this whole thread in general. Many companies, large and small, make decisions that result in a change of direction or focus. The results of those changes may mean that some of roles are no longer needed. Is it inherently negative for an IT group to say they want to focus on new development and not sustainment? Is it because out-sourcing is "bad"? Is it because Disney is a large corporation and "enterprise" has such a negative connotation?

I honestly want to understand this better, because I don't get why there is _so_ much negativity around this.

[gaius]

Because the roles obviously were needed. Did you read the article? And they did not know, one guy was even given a raise just before.