Team Disney. Feature Animation. KP1. Feature Animation. KP2. KP1. Team Disney.
Those are the buildings I sat in across eleven years on Disney’s technology side. It averages out to a move every single year. Every move cost money — movers, redesigned layouts, new furniture — and not one of them happened for us.
Part 1 of this series, The Storage Closet, is the personal bill: burnout, accommodations, and what I was offered when I asked for help. This one is about the leadership decisions around all of it. The claim is not that Disney’s leaders were stupid. The claim is that they optimized for optics over results, consistently, for years — and you could read it straight off the floor plan.
The Productivity Theory
Remote work was not a pandemic invention for us. My team worked from home two or three days a week for years before 2020, and nobody asked or said anything. During the pandemic, our leaders bragged about it: we could work from anywhere, all we needed was our laptops. Within a couple of years, the same leaders had decided that arrangement was the problem, and that the office would somehow make us more productive. We were expected to forget the old philosophy because forgetting had become convenient.
The justification came from the very top. Our CTO told us: “We are in the hospitality business. You should be here.”
Nobody on my team was checking in a guest. We were a technology team, and technology teams tend to be distributed — ours more than most, because of how Disney hires. Disney is not a technology company. It does not pay what the big technology companies pay, and it does not carry their prestige with engineers, so it has to offer something else to attract talent. Instead, leadership made hiring more restrictive: they wanted people in Orlando, one of the harder markets in the country to hire technical talent in. The predictable result was that we leaned heavily on third-party vendors. And here is the kicker — very few of them were local. We worked extensively with vendors who supplied remote contractors, and nine times out of ten, those contractors were the ones doing the actual implementation.
So return to office meant this: a team whose real workforce was remote by design commuting into a building with no assigned seats and no space for vendors, to meet on screens with the people doing the work somewhere else. Our leaders never took fifteen minutes to watch how we actually worked. Fifteen minutes on the floor would have shown them everything — the headphones, the meetings happening on Teams, the empty chairs where a vendor was never going to sit. The theory was dead on arrival, and nobody in charge ever performed the autopsy.
Two Mandates That Cancel Out
At the same time leadership was mandating desks, it was mandating AI. Incorporate it into everything — that was the direction.
Those two mandates cancel each other out. A Teams meeting documents itself: the AI takes notes in real time, the recording exists, the decisions are searchable, and the agents we were told to build can actually consume all of it. A side conversation at a desk — the thing our leaders said they wanted more of — is invisible to every bit of that. Whatever gets decided in a hallway has to be carried back into the documentation and the tools by hand, a jump added to the middle of every decision. They mandated the one channel their own AI strategy could not hear. Entirely self-inflicted.
I was a senior software engineer and I could see this from my desk on the floor. The people whose offices overlooked that floor never saw it. Overlooked turned out to be the right word in both directions.
When Everything Is Urgent
We never had a proper roadmap. Not a rough one, not a draft — none. There was no prioritization, so every problem arrived urgent, needed ASAP. When every problem is urgent, nothing is. We spent enormous amounts of time spinning our wheels to show progress on paper instead of making real progress, because progress on paper was what got inspected. Optics over results was not a failure mode of the operation. It was the operation.
And when the gap between the paper and the reality came due, the developers were expected to close it. Deadlines would bear down and leadership would go home early, same as always. They expected us to stay.
The Rules Engine
My last project there was the whole method in one story. We were expected to deliver code before the requirements were finalized. I cannot count the times I delivered exactly to spec, watched the spec change retroactively, and was expected — along with the rest of the team — to absorb it and say nothing. That was not an incident. That was the process.
I raised it in every single one-on-one I had. Nothing changed. What I got instead, repeatedly, was: “I need to see movement on the rules engine.”
There was movement. It was happening in the design and the architecture, which is where movement belongs when nobody knows yet exactly what the thing is supposed to do. Our business partners needed time. They did not know what they did not know — and that is not a criticism, that is how real projects begin. But my boss wanted the rules engine live on the site while we were still working out what it would even do. “Movement” did not mean something true in the architecture. It meant something visible on a screen. The team was expected to just figure it out.
The Building Shuffle
Back to that list of buildings. Seven addresses, eleven years. Each move meant relocating everything we had, and each new floor got redesigned — executives never had trouble finding extra budget for their own offices. Move by move, more of our space became their space. By the end, we did not have conference rooms. The team that had been ordered back to the office for the sake of collaboration had nowhere to hold a meeting.
The KP2 move happened as a favor to our Director. As part of the deal, we were told we would have first dibs on where to sit in the new space. That lasted a few months before we were moved again. It was neither the first nor the last promise to evaporate that way, and it is the pattern in miniature: the move served someone above us, a promise bought our compliance, and the promise did not survive the next reshuffle.
And the geography. KP1 and KP2 sit across the street from Universal Studios. Disney cast members, summoned back to the office to be together, badging in every morning with a view of the competition’s parks. Very magical.
By my last year, if you wanted a meeting, you booked a screen. The conference rooms were offices now. The doors were closed.
