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And the truth of the story... After a decade of failing to deploy even basic technology, the group was finally disbanded and their services outsourced to a local company which had been providing all the services to the merchandising group, park services, resort services - in the end, all their responsibility was just back stage services, and they couldn't even manage to handle those tasks.

The company that was brought in originally came into the picture during technology upgrades for merchandising (all the registers you see in the parks.) The in house technology group handled all other technology services on property.

After hurricane Floyd, they were brought in to handle the communication problems that had park operations resorting to personal cell phones for nearly 30 days. They replaced the two broken cables which the technology group said was impossible to replace, and who needed to anyway? Less than 48 hours after the contract was awarded, park operations was fully back online.

Security was the next to be switched over after a week of security relying on the park operation channels. Next was the resorts, who each had been giving away dozens of rooms a day to disgruntled guests who couldn't even log onto the wifi for checking e-mail. Within a week, after replacing dime store routers throughout the resorts, internet complaints from guests plummeted.

Finally, after one of the most basic systems, the time management system (which clocks in employees and dispatches those to cover breaks) broke down and went to a manual system in November 2014. After contracting for repairs with the outside company, and having the system back up within 8 hours vs the week of downtime, the decision was made to simply get rid of the department which couldn't even handle back stage data management, and the contract was awarded to the outside company in December.

Yes, this outside company did hire H1B visa holders to come in, they are also the largest technology company in th region now, with many local employees, with more being hired daily as H1B visas expire.

Your post is going to infuriate a lot of FReepers - but there is truth in it. Many American IT workers have a grotesquely inflated opinion of their own value - much of it based on the high salaries and contract rates paid to them between 1985 and 2005, when IT talent was relatively scarce. Company CFO's haven't forgotten those days. They feel they never received the service they paid for, and they are constantly looking for any opportunity to dump the expense of in-house IT and implement cheaper alternatives. They feel that since aren't getting what they pay for now, so what difference does it make if cheaper Indian H1B's do the work?

IT is today a disrespected profession in corporate circles, as a direct result of the excesses of previous decades. I suspect the day of the in-house IT professional is nearly over in most firms, and outsourcing of the function in its entirety to dedicated IT companies using talent from multiple, local and remote locations (as in your example) is the future.

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Thanks for posting this. I can’t blame Disney for fighting internal incompetance. However, this is management incompetance. They sound like public sector managers.

The first line workers deserve better direction from the chain above them, that does not include firing persons.

That said, IT helpdesk work, first level, is easily transferred to an outsider. The fired persons needed to get into code writing or configuration at some level.