Disney research lab Zurich
Hey, Does anyone have any information about Disney research lab in Zurich, Switzerland. I am potentially starting process with them. How is work there? How interviews look like? Any compensation data? TC: peanuts #disney #disneyresearch
Disney computer vision is actually impressive. Definitely really good experience to work there
So good learning potentially
A peer grad student in my department got a job with them back in 2012 and transferred to the Zurich branch later (he is Swiss). He says he loves the job but it’s extremely hard to get hired and they don’t pay well. A lot of over-published academics try for it as an alternative to tenure track professor jobs, and don’t mind lower pay to be able to just focus on publishing. I think they get way more candidates for every role than they could possibly consider and the job doesn’t involve hardly any SWE work beyond spaghetti code you can string together for publication results. Disney operates it for two reasons: 1) as a stream of IP / patent materials around rendering, image processing and graphics, and 2) for marketing and recruiting so they can be part of major computer vision and film technology conferences. Probably very few projects ever see the light of day - they are just the cost of doing business to get the rare few projects that lead to an important patent or splashy demoware presentation at CVPR.
Really interesting input. I am potentially going as SWE or research engineer (in between research and engineering). But in general job is fun and a lot of learnigs but pay is low?
Yes, that’s my understanding. A lot of in-house kludgy software that’s been built up over time and kind of specific to different researchers running different project areas, but also a lot of freedom to try greenfield systems or tools and write a lot of things from scratch. The experience probably wouldn’t translate well back to big tech firms that run normal SDLCs for product development, but it also would be a lot more fun to write research code from scratch and you’ll get exposed to a lot of different projects all the time.
Did internship with them sometimes ago. It is kind of a collection of small university-like labs. My intern salary was lower than in the top companies in US. Overall, good memories.
What “research” does Disney need to do? Optimize superhero concepts for action figure sales vs not-too-overt eroticism?
Here is one example where they increase the frame rate of movies with phase based optical flow. This saves memory because you can save a decimated version of movies and then speed it up only when you need to. https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/phasebased/
Computer vision, face modeling, animation