So couple of months ago we (SiriusXM) got a new CTO from Disney and after he joined, people poured in from Disney and all got hired as either SVP, VP or Director (even though some got promotion just couple of months ago in Disney, so kinda double promotion for them). Though we have hiring freeze technically, we keep getting these management people from Disney even though we actually need more dev and QA. Soo many sharp minds have already left SXM who were with company for long. Is there anyone from Disney/Hulu who can share their experience working with these folks (I’m guessing guys from Disney/Hulu already know whom I’m talking about)? I have heard pretty bad stories about Hulu when Disney acquired them….
Oh boy you are in for a fun ride
Did you have experience working with these guys? It seems they have emptied the Disney tech stack as they are bringing in everyone even though we don’t need
Joe Inzerillo is pretty sharp and was a significant factor to the success of Disney+. I’ve seen many of my old colleagues from DSS come over. Many of which are very bright as well.
I have heard that they have completely obliterated the Hulu team, something similar is going on here now. But as you are saying he is very sharp, only time will tell where we land.
All I can say is: run for the hills. He is a toxic presence and he will most definitely destroy all the decent tech you created over the years. JI was a key contributor to Hulu's demise under Disney. As a CTO he was incompetent, as a leader he was completely toxic. Hundreds of people left Hulu because of his terrible technical decisions and shitty leadership. His leadership style is built on an unfounded belief that he's always right and that all tough problems can be solved by just yelling louder. Someone like him would've never been hired by Hulu, he would've been deemed a poor culture fit in the very first interview. He is a relic of a bygone era. Incompetence breeds incompetence, of course, so JI was surrounded by others like him who had no idea how to effectively lead engineering teams or make smart technical decisions. Needless to say majority of his underlings looked like him, there was barely any diversity among his directs. Shitty performance of those under him was protected and rewarded, so when he left to go ruin Sirius many of his most loyal sycophants left with him because they knew they couldn't survive without his protection. His crown jewel accomplishment during his tenure as CTO of the joint Hulu+DSS tech org was the completely unnecessary platform unification project that was planned and executed so poorly that even now, 2 years after it started, it is nowhere close to completion. JI was so cocky and convinced that DSS/BAMtech had built the best most awesome media tech stack in the world that he just couldn't wrap his head around the fact that Hulu was a different product with different requirements and couldn't just be made to run on the DSS platform overnight - but he pushed anyway, regardless of if it made sense or not. The unification has been such an unmitigated disaster that the new CTO has been spending most of his time since joining Disney undoing JI's terrible decisions. I'm really sorry that you ended up with JI as your CTO. No company deserves to be punished that way. 😟
What do you think about Kelly Campbell and Peacock?
We are already seeing all the stuffs you have mentioned and you are spot on. He is trying exactly the same in SXM. He is trying the same platform unification stuff without understanding how SXM works where we have lot of hardware side of work which goes directly in the car and also have streaming which doesn’t work the same way as the other SXM child companies do- like Pandora or Stitcher.. People have already started leaving the company and some who are tremendously efficient had to leave as things are directionless and uncertain. Wondering how SXM didn’t learn from Disney and making the same mistake.
Sorry, aphrodisia. Yeah. I can’t believe he is asking for migration again. Sometimes unification takes too much work because of different requirements (like those for the vehicle). The first migration seemed so painful and took time away from improving features and other performance. Why do that again? It seems like Joe doesn’t understand technology. I hope he is not gunning for the CEO role.
I’ve heard from several folks that he also does not understand sat ops and wants to kill the current sat platform. Nevermind that that business is actually making some decent cash and that there are all these multi-year contracts with OEMs. If it isn’t streaming he doesn’t want to do it. Not sure how that would help him if he wants to be CEO.
There is zero chance he’ll be CEO. He’s already lost respect from other C- levels.
Lmao at the shilling for JI
@OP - have worked in pre-Joe and post-Joe Disney. Joe actually led people. There’s a reason why a lot of the beloved leaders left Disney after Joe left. He inspired people (from Baseball days thru D+ launch) and pushed for creativity and innovation in technology. He also challenged product in a good way and protected the org from the ridiculousness from Disney Execs as best he could. Post-Joe… has been tough. There’s no direction, new CTO was invisible for first 3 months, there’s a lot of infighting. It’s no a great place to be anymore. Hulu people left because they didn’t want to help solve the problems even though we were actually on the same page about a lot of things. They just bailed because they thought they were the most important when, in fact, their services kept crashing and the engineers that were supporting them had left with no documentation. Legacy Disney people had to clean up their mess. Platform unification just made sense in some areas. Why support two systems doing the exact same thing? That’s just bad business. At least Joe was telling Disney what we were going to do and how we we’re going g to do it vs what is happening now (Disney dictating what we should do). I’m feeling the pain of some of the leaders that left. Some were really committed to working towards bettering things vs there for the paycheck. They were no nonsense people who were fun to work with. And they were all really smart. Sure there are some mediocre people. But the folks that went to Sirius are the ones that actually got shit done.
Curious why you didn’t follow Joe to SiriusXM?
Lolol sounds like a Joe’s Stewart who already followed him to SXM
@diptong the way @xrSE21 is saying, I can assure you, he/she is either already on the boat or in the process of boarding 😄 In the time of so called hiring freeze and lay offs (on top of talents leaving the company by themselves), we see tons of directors, VPs and SVPs joining kinda every week. What a joke… The way JI and his battalion talks about transparency, it’s like looking for sun on a super cloudy day… ridiculous
Yeah no doubt Joe has his followers. He doesn’t yet have the faith of most of the team or even his C level peers. His lack of audio and music industry experience is a huge glaring hole and concern given he leads the product vision.
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