Under the shadow of the Mouse

All right, I promised this one a while back and I guess it’s time to fess up. Let’s all gather togather and learn just a bit about working for Disney.

All right, first off, I don’t work for Disney. I work for Walt Disney Internet Group, which is part of WDPRO, which is essentially it’s own company. ACtually, I don’t even work for them, I work for a recruitment firm who’s placed me in the DIG office long-term. Because of these two layers of abstraction, I’m somewhat sheilded from the weirdness that is Disney employment. I didn’t have to go to the two day Disney University orientation, or tour the parks or studios, or pledge confidence under pain of death. I didn’t get the coveted Silver Pass and I don’t learn the secret handshake. What I do get is a hell of a lot more money than McElroy was willing to pay me, in exchange for much shorter days and better organized projects.

Too bad I’m not actually working on any of these projects quite yet. It’s been three weeks and we have yet to do any work. Lots of web surfing. A little blogging. One day we got to compare wireframes to comps and take notes on inconsistancies. Of course all the comps and most of the wireframes were not current, so this was apparently nothing more than busy work. Another day, we got to reposition a div. That was it for the day.

Honestly, I was really happy to have the time to take it slow when we first started. DIG uses their own scripting language called Tea, running on their own server software, called Barista. Barista is basically a Java shell that parses and runs the presentational Tea templates that it will some day be my job to write. Anyways, these are obviously not technologies I was already familiar with, so having a little bit of time to take it in was welcome, but this is getting silly.

Another bit of a downside is that I don’t particularly care for Tea. It’s very, very limited — apparently to keep the layers of content seperate from presentation, seperate from functionality. Makes sense, but it’s a bit more segmented than I was prepared for. It also serves to keep the programming roles very seperate. I’m not even considered a Developer, but a Technical Producer. Why? Because Tea can’t legally create it’s own functions. There is, of course, a way around this, but using it is a good way to get to be known as “that guy.” Legitimate functions have to be written by an Engineer and implemented in the version of the Barista .jar that runs your page.

As a Technical Producer, my job is to fetch information from the CMS and display it on a page using technology that doesn’t interest me and that I’ll never use again.

I left McElroy, and a chance to continue developing in C#.NET, for this. Am I glad I did it?

Hell yes. I’m meeting people, getting freelance gigs, getting home at a reasonable time, getting paid for each hour I work, and making about 46% more than I was before.

Yes, I’m glad I did it, even if there are down sides. You’ll be glad I did it, too… after I catch up with my bills and invite you over to check out my new block-out-the-sun-sized tv. Some day.