Buyout Offers From WBD and Others Will Put a Lot of Experienced People Out of Work

Buyout offers for WBD employees in the U.S. have gone out, with the deadline to accept them this Sunday. I’m told that anyone above VP didn’t get an offer. This follows the recent, undisclosed number of buyouts offered by Disney, the rumored additional layoffs that may soon take place, and the recent layoffs at Netflix.

Across the industry, a large pool of very experienced streaming engineers is about to be looking for new jobs, including OGs who have built video pipelines for decades. For anyone hiring for tech jobs in the video stack, I don’t recall ever seeing such a deep pool of engineering talent. The buyout offers span more than just engineering departments, but it’s one area where the impact can be felt quickly in the DTC user experience. This is especially true at WBD, since Skydance plans to combine multiple DTC services into one offering over time.

Within Disney’s core streaming engineering team, I know of at least six individuals who are taking the buyout offer. I’m not going to name them; I’ll let them announce it themselves when the time is right, but it’s a shame to see. A lot of great talent is about to leave DTC services companies, and it’s an opportunity for others to hire them for their knowledge and experience. Contact me if you are looking to hire; I can make some recommendations and introductions.

I’ve seen some suggest that Netflix’s recent round of layoffs will cause “technical problems” with its live events, but that’s not accurate. Netflix’s live team wasn’t affected by the layoffs in any meaningful way, so I don’t expect Netflix’s QoE to decline at all. There’s been a lot of discussion on LinkedIn about layoffs at Disney over the past few years, but between 2023 and 2025, Disney’s employee headcount only dropped by 6,000 (Form 10-K). As an industry, we talk about layoffs, but rarely new hires. It’s not publicly known how many layoffs Disney did versus new hires, or from which divisions, but overall headcount over the past two years was down only 2.5%.

Disney is taking a lot of flak online for doing multiple rounds of layoffs, but over the past three years, its business and leadership have changed massively.

• This year, Disney required employees to return to the office, and it let go of some who didn’t
• In January of last year, Disney re-orged its parks business and announced new executives and new positions
• In August of 2025, Disney launched ESPN Unlimited
• In October of 2025, Disney closed on the Hulu+ Live TV merger with Fubo
• In 2025, Disney shut down plans to launch the Venu Sports streaming service with FOX and WBD
• In March of this year, Disney’s new CEO started, and executives moved into new positions Disney had never had before, including a CTO role

The reality is that more layoffs are coming, and 2027 will be a tough year to get hired, even for those with deep experience. Contact me if I can help.