Why 'What's Opera, Doc?' looks like that

What's always been a bit surprising to me is that the conductor Leopold Stokowski had enough 'cultural cachet' that there was some expectation that people watching the cartoon would recognize the reference to him ("Leopold!"): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Stokowski#Hollywood_Bo... Not sure that the general public would have any kind of awareness for conductors or anyone in the classical music world today: perhaps Yo-Yo Ma, and some years ago 'The Three Tenors' were a thing.

• WalterBright · 1 hour ago

  I've been known to mumble "Leopold!" at inappropriate times.

> To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion. (The mysterious price increases angered the managers, Jones said, but they were “not very bright” and didn’t figure out the trick.) How many companies work just because the average worker is the one making it work? In my experience a lot of them. It is sad that the money always accumulates at the top even when so often that same people at the top are an impediment for doing better work.

• WalterBright · 1 hour ago

  I had a conversation with an engineering manager a few years ago. He told me his daily job was to visit each engineer report, and ask them what they were working on. Then he'd gently guide them back to what they were supposed to be working on. A business has limited resources, and somebody has to decide which hill they're going to conquer. The reason managers make more is because their decisions can make more / lose more money than the workers. BTW, in every company I've worked for, all of the workers thought they were smarter than the manager (including yours truly). The funny part would be when one would be promoted into management, and instantly became incompetent in the estimation of the other workers.

  • GolfPopper · 57 minutes ago

    Clashing priorities. Generally speaking, workers want the business to work , i.e. to do the thing for which it was ostensibly created. (If they didn't want that, they would go work somewhere else.) Management wants the business to make money , which is increasingly poorly aligned with the business fulfilling it's ostensible purpose well. Now, without money, the business stops working. But increasingly - by which I mean, every for-profit business for which I've worked in the last 25 years - what I see is management trading the long-term health of the business for short-term profit, trusting that they won't be the ones to face the consequences. It's the officers of a ship who are only interest in getting this cargo to its destination (after which they'll move to a different ship or retire) no matter how badly the ship and its relationships are abused in the process vs. the crew, for whom the ship is their life and their home.

    • DanielHB · 48 minutes ago

      One of my main motivations as a leaf node in the org tree is to try to make my job the least annoying possible. Meaning spending time making sure things don't annoy me in the future (like cleaning up code, updating legacy systems, fixing bugs in ways that ensure they won't happen again). Not necessarily so I can work less (afterall there is always work to do as a developer). But so I don't get annoyed. Usually that ends up saving time for the company, but not always.

      • selfhoster1312 · 35 minutes ago

        Not always, but overall having cleaner code with less bugs, more documentation and tests, is not just an annoyance to you. It's a money-maker for your employer as well in the long term by virtue of reducing burnout rate, decreasing onboarding time, making any improvement possible at all...

  • Citizen_Lame · 57 minutes ago

    Sure, but this is an animation studio. How very HN bro response.

  • 21asdffdsa12 · 1 minute ago

    Stop fixing the tech debt, add more adds instead for virtual promotion points. And remove the old working products. The organization be agonizing.

Oh, what a great cartoon that is! In my college daze, Chuck Jones dropped by to give a talk to a packed auditorium. Of course, what he showed was What's Opera Doc. We all loved it, and Chuck enjoyed our enthusiasm.

> It’s one of the really famous cartoons. If you’re reading this newsletter, you’ve probably watched it yourself. I've never heard of it and would have appreciated at least a cursory definition. I thought I was going to see an article about an ad for Opera the browser.