Rest of story
___________________________
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.
Public sector management is an excellent example of the mindset - I have x in my budget, I need that to last for the year, and so I'm going to base purchasing decisions on that budget. Fine, I guess, after the rollout of a project, but not for the actual rollout. They were performing tasks based on a maintenance budget rather than on a deployment budget.
And morale was particularly low in the department, as they'd repair the same issues over and over and over again. Rather than solving a problem, they'd end up patching it so that the next shift could handle it all over again.
I realize this isn't the narrative that most want to hear, and it could have been solved by actually assigning management that was technology oriented, but it was viewed as a dead end position within the company - if you were a technology hotshot, would you rather work on rolling out MagicBands or ride engineering, or be in charge of making sure that automated security gates opened when a transponder vehicle arrived?
I get the mindset that caused these issues, and the solution, while it harmed some employees, ultimately helped the company.
By the way, one of the old IT employees who shifted to another position in the company now works over at Tri-Circle D ranch at Disneyworld, leading guest experiences on horseback or training horses. They are not only back up to the same salary they had in the IT department, but his pleasure is that every day he gets to see and interact with happy people.
He's one of the many former IT workers who have been posting on employee forums, attempting to fight the union propaganda of the IT department's demise.