Career Advice About Disney

In anticipation of my , we can collect questions here. I can also answer questions afterward.

Work history

I've worked in leadership positions at companies like Netflix (2013 - 2017), Google (2017 - 2021), and now Disney. I'm currently a Director of Software Engineering at Disney as part of Disney Streaming (Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+ Star+).

Happy to talk about mobile development, engineering management, and career growth.

Other

I have a deep background in music and audio, having received a Masters in Music & Audio Technology in 2003, and then working with Dolby for more than 5 years.

After I left Google, I took a career break to learn, explore, and recharge. I traveled to Ghana, learned about accounting, became a startup advisor, and read a lot.

I'm on LinkedIn here: .

Let me preface this by saying I have extreme impostor syndrome and I am optimizing for most chill company that's easier to survive in. I have offers from cockroach labs, and disney streaming. Both are senior level offers. At my last company (which i was let go from, I believe it was cause I took too long to resolve an outage in their eyes) i was basically doing mid level eng work so I'm not even sure I'm senior material tbh.

I have a little over 5 yoe. I've been laid off before and my perf has oscillated from good to bad etc (at times I've had personal things interfere with my work) so I'm very fearful of cutthroat/extremely high expectations environments.

From what I've seen, cockroach labs is very highly regarded in the industry, so in the case where I get laid off, it may be better to have a better brand name on my resume. They also do seem to have a good wlb. However, a lot of the people there are coming from other very reputable companies, and I'm very worried I won't be up to the par compared to these people, especially in this environment where performance is looked at more closely. They also did a large RIF last year which impacted low performers.

As far as disney, it may be easier to meet the expectations if the talent bar is lower, but they have done a fair amount of layoffs over the last few years, and the streaming unit has only recently gotten profitable. Seems the leadership is telling a story this will last, it's unclear how well the performance of the business will be long term. Cockroach labs seems to be very well positioned from a company performance POV.

I say all this because I don't really want to go through another job searching phase for a while, so I'm considering the strength of the business as well in addition to how capable I would be of surviving at the company.

Why does Disney Plus use an entirely different video component when wanting to display ads?

During my making of a browser extension that either manipulates current subtitles or adds new ones to a video on various platforms:

I have to partially reverse engineer how each site is going about the displaying of subtitles and the handling of their video client.

I found myself encountering a random edge case with Disney+ that every 5 - 10 reloads of a video - my extension would break due to the expected elements not being there.

What was happening was that Disney+ would add a completely different video client with completely overwritten HTML5 video element APIs and an arbitrary offset of 20 seconds to the time.

Other video platforms such as YouTube, Netflix etc don't function like this and have a standard video client with adverts working with that standard client.

Is this just bad engineering from Disney Plus's part or part of some type of AB test or is there something more technical I haven't thought about?

Tricky to answer for certain unless you've worked there but I'm interested in the different perspectives.