Dyson Will Spend $1.4 Billion, Enlist 3,000 Engineers To Build a Better Battery (digitaltrends.com) 244
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Among the 100 new products the company founder James Dyson wants to invent by 2020, the greatest investment in people and money is to improve rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, as reported by Forbes (Warning: paywalled). And Dyson is not planning incremental improvements. His opinion is that current Li-ion batteries don't last long enough and aren't safe enough -- the latter as evidenced by their propensity to spontaneously catch on fire, which is rare but does happen. Dyson believes the answer lies in using ceramics to create solid-state lithium-ion batteries. Dyson says he intended to spend $1.4 billion in research and development and in building a battery factory over the next five years. Last year Dyson bought Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Sakti3, which focuses on creating advanced solid-state batteries, for $90 million. The global lithium-ion battery market accounts for $40 billion in annual sales, according to research firm Lux as cited by Forbes. Dyson's company (which is an accurate description since he has 100-percent ownership) currently employs 3,000 engineers worldwide. He intends to hire another 3,000 by 2020. Their average age is 26. Dyson values young engineers, saying, "The enthusiasm and lack of fear is important. Not taking notice of experts and plowing on because you believe in something is important. It's much easier to do when you're young."
Good on him (Score:3, Interesting)
Better battery tech is about the most important thing in energy today, because it will let us make more use of "alternative" energy sources (you know, ones which were in use to do work long before anyone was using electricity, or building ICEs or steam turbines or even steam engines) right now. The only thing that might be even more compelling in the short term would be a safe way to store apparently physics-defying quantities of hydrogen and release small or large amounts of it later as necessary without having to expend a lot of energy to do so, but even that has less applications than a better battery.
One (okay, I) wonder[s] where battery tech would be today if EVs had remained dominant and not been pushed out by subsidized oil and coal.
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There is already an awesome battery tech, holding about 10kWh of energy in a small package that already exist, it's good old gas. The only problem is that it takes 100 millions years to produce.
The other problem is that you can't just feed it into an electric motor. You have to either feed it into a fuel cell which is lame for many reasons which I should not need to enumerate here, or you have to feed it into an ICE which is lame for even more reasons which etc etc. Or an external combustion engine, but (stationary generation aside) that only really works for trains and it's not really convenient there, either. Electric motors are wonderful in every way compared to ICEs, and batteries are wonderfu
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Or an external combustion engine, but (stationary generation aside) that only really works for trains and it's not really convenient there, either.
Oh ye of little faith!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_4scv... [blogspot.com]
http://i65.photobucket.com/alb... [photobucket.com]
That beaut is a 1925 Doble steamer, the pinnacle of steam cars. They could be run from cold in 30 seconds (45 seconds on a freezing New York morning), hit 90mph reliably, and were quiet and not smoky. Unmodified Dobles meet current stringent emissions regulations (much easier
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I've watched the Jay Leno's Garage on his Doble. It was an amazing thing. But the system takes up too much space. Compare the Doble to a Fiesta with a 1 liter Ecoboost engine and there's no contest in any category. Physics limits how small a steam system can be; it could perhaps be more compact than in the Doble, but how much more? If you're going to go that far in your quest for a new-old engine, NASA's proven Stirling engine tech is probably a better example.
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EVs would have been overtaken by ICE technology regardless of whatever conspiratal notions you are imagining.
ICEs still provide a superior driving experience per dollar, and most people who have an EV wouldn't have one if not for subsidies... to compete with the entrenched energy monopolies' subsidies.
Re:Good on him (Score:5, Funny)
My Tesla is a far superior driving experience than any ICE car I have ever owned (i.e. Porsche, Audi, etc.). It is faster, quieter, smoother, better handling. Better in every way. There is no way I will ever buy an ICE car again.
The subsidy was a very small percentage of the cost and was not a factor in the purchase.
Whatever you do, don't take a Tesla test drive. It will make you hate your slow, noisy, polluting ICE car forever.
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Teslas are nice cars, but they don't handle better, not by a long shot. Some of that is because of the battery packs, which leads to any tesla (P85D+) that can actually out accelerate my car (in a straight line and only up to ~110MPH at which point I out accelerate it, and pass it at ~140MPH) weighing more than 50% more than my car (corvette stingray). Unfortunately, tesla can't defy physics, and that means teslas have pretty poor handling. However, it is incredibly impressive for what it is -- a high tec
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Uh, actually, yes it is.
3300*1.5=4950, which falls into my category of "a tad under 5000 lbs".
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If you have only 1 friend, get the Stingray.
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"Unfortunately, tesla can't defy physics, and that means teslas have pretty poor handling. However, it is incredibly impressive for what it is -- a high tech 4 seater EV sedan."
And those sell in much higher numbers than cars like Stingrays. BMW, Audis and Mercedes have quite a few performance sedan models where Teslas are similar in weight and cost. I guess you don't have much to worry about for the next few years - until their next-gen Roadster debuts - if they survive that long.
Re: Good on him (Score:2)
I can tell you've never driven a Tesla.
The low center of gravity and perfect 50/50 weight distribution keeps it glued to the road.
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It will make you hate your slow, noisy, polluting ICE car forever.
But you just listed all the reasons to own a Dodge Ram.
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Whatever you do, don't take a Tesla test drive. It will make you hate your slow, noisy, polluting ICE car forever.
What makes me hate my ICE car is unreliability. But when it's working, my A8 Quattro is not exactly an unpleasant driving experience. You can get a spectacular (old) one for ten grand and the price difference will pay for fuel just about for life. I should have spent more on mine :p
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Further, even if you cut gas use in half, taking 200 years to burn it all instead of 100 years isn't going to change the total amount of gas burned, it will just take slightly longer, and from the climate's point of view, 100 years and 200 years are the same thing.
The only real solution to CO2 is to leave the oil in the ground and the only way to do that is to stop burning it completely. A small fraction of people driving EVs isn't going to change one very simple fact...
We're going to burn EVERY DROP OF OIL IN THE GROUND THAT WE CAN FIND.
Now think about THAT for a minute... because unless you can change that, your Tesla doesn't change anything.
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Finally, have you looked up what it would take to just stop CO2 from going up, much less to bring it back down? If you haven't, you might want to, the numbers are sobering. In short, we are WAY past the point of no return on runaway CO2 levels, there is zero chance that we're going to stop this at 500 or even 600 PPM CO2 levels. The changes required to do it are far too extreme and simply would not be acceptable to the masses.
I'm beginning to understand your position. I'm glad you understand that we need to stop burning fossil fuel and leave it all in the ground.
However, I am disappointed by your cynicism about what is possible. This is understandable and, at times, I too get completely discouraged and feel that we are way past the point of no return on runaway CO2. I do not feel that we should just give up and not try. It may be a futile effort but I think we should make the effort. When I bought my Tesla and solar PV, I (half
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I have an e-golf, and while it's not for everybody and my next car might not be an EV, it's a way better driving experience than an Internal Combustion engine. Accelerates better, drives quieter, and it's smoother.
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drives quieter, and it's smoother.
When arguing ICE vs EV, I get the impression that noise and vibration is considered a good thing with ICE.
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One day you should actually drive an EV instead of just spurting unjustified nonsense.
You can get a lovely used luxury car with better interior quality than a Tesla for around ten grand in very good condition. (The best examples of older luxobarges seem to run about that.) Per dollar, it walks all over the Tesla. Yes, the Tesla is a better car. It's not a hundred thousand dollars better. Used Teslas won't be that cheap for decades.
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There are many other (large) industries that rely heavily on batteries. They've been heavily researched for over 100 years.
Yes, but so have ICEs, and they still suck. Only minor improvements in efficiency have been realized in the last forty years. A forty year old turbo diesel still provides pretty good thermodynamic efficiency. It does it without producing much CO2 as a result, although it will tend to crank out quite a bit of NOx. Over that time, automotive ICE efficiency has improved by only in the low double digit percents, while electric motor efficiency has about doubled — and it's over three times as good as an IC
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I don't know where you got the idea electric motors have improved so dramatically the last 40 years? They haven't, how can one double 90%+ efficiency?
And while ICEs have low efficiency they cover more of the energy delivery cycle than electric motors - energy storage, energy conversion which need to be taken into account if comparing.
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I don't know where you got the idea electric motors have improved so dramatically the last 40 years? They haven't, how can one double 90%+ efficiency?
EV motors weren't 90% efficient 40 years ago. Now they are up to 95% efficient, even during regen.
Forbes: (Warning paywalled) (Score:3)
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And you know it's paywalled! So why using that article at all?
Actually it doesn't seem to be paywalled - or at least there may be a limited number of articles available for free.
I had been avoiding Forbes because of their adblock-blocking, but I was able
to read OK (this time).
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No dice.
Ad blocker says 8 ads are blocked but Forbes won't let me in. /Oblg. "And nothing of value was lost." I'll get my news elsewhere that doesn't nag me for being protective of my computer running your buggy / malicious code.
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Actually it doesn't seem to be paywalled - or at least there may be a limited number of articles available for free.
It seems to be more or less random, or based on cookies that the site handles. Recently I could access easily a few articles from Forbes. This one was "hard-paywalled", meaning have to subscribe to something, and waiting for "3.. 2.. 1" didn't work either. Oh, and I'm using AdBlock+, that could be the reason.
Anyway anyone should use AdBlock+ or an equivalent, so this article is paywalled.
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Actually it doesn't seem to be paywalled - or at least there may be a limited number of articles available for free.
You're right, it's not paywall. Paywall implies I could pay for something. All I get is a quote of the day and then nothing at all. It's probably fighting with my ad blocker but frankly I'm glad the latter is winning.
Still have no idea what the article says though.
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And you know it's paywalled! So why using that article at all?
If the main Forbes site gives you trouble (or you just don't want to patronize them), try the Internet Archive [archive.org]. Seems to work okay for me.
Wheels (Score:2, Interesting)
It's also a lot easier to poorly re-invent wheels when you are young. I understand the sentiment that he wants young people willing to take chances but, this isn't some startup company catering to a hipster internet fad. This is an initiative to produce real world, useful products that have a potential to kill people or cause millions of dollars in property damage from fires. It would be ludicrous to focus on getting young engineers for a project like this.
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It would be ludicrous to focus on getting young engineers for a project like this.
Not to mention that it's an offensively age-ist thing to do.
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It's also a lot easier to poorly re-invent wheels when you are young.
Well that fits the profile of his company, which he built on not understanding the physics of a cyclone separator and infamously trial and erroring till he got it to work. Or copying a fanless blade design from a 20 year old Toshiba patent and then trial an errored different patent submissions until the patents office accidentally accepted the idea as original.
Expect to hear him invent some battery chemistry which we have covered on slashdot before.
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Look what a bunch of very young engineers pulled off almost 50 years ago (apollo)
Here is a picture of those young engineers; http://history.nasa.gov/SP-410... [nasa.gov]
Re:Wheels (Score:4, Informative)
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The primary advantage of young engineers is that they are cheap and disposable. That's not to say that young engineers are necessarily bad engineers. I've met plenty of 22 year old rockstars that I've enjoyed working with and have even learned from. But, when you explicitly state that you want to hire young engineers, it can actually be re-phrased as, "We want a cheap, disposable workforce that, hopefully, with time, will throw enough shit at the wall that some of it might stick".
For their cordless "stick" vacs I'm sure. (Score:3)
If you thought Dyson vacuums sucked before, just wait.
Average age of 26... (Score:2)
Guess that is why the products tend to focus on an idea, aesthetics, and a general lack of follow-through.
Not too sure about the solid-state batteries yet, but they are getting hype...Just not sure Dyson is much of a custodian of the technology.
Really (Score:2)
Crap batteries in Dyson vacuums (Score:2)
I dunno, better batteries sounds great, but how about just putting decent batteries that are already available in his overpriced vacuum cleaners?
I mean Jebus, the fscking $300 handheld Dyson I have doesn't even last for 15 minutes. In the mean time my Ryobi tools run for hours on a charge.
Re:Crap batteries in Dyson vacuums (Score:4, Interesting)
They may be good at coming up with some things but their implementation sucks.
I bought one of their tower fans for my bedroom. The infrared sensor for the remote is at the bottom of the unit so I had to sit up and reach my arm up in order for the remote to be in line with the sensor. It would also be a problem if any room with furniture in the way. Put the sensor at the top of the fan so it can be easily be seen by the remote.
The other big thing that bugged me about that fan was that it didn't remember if the oscillation was turned on or not. When you turned on the fan you always had to turn on the oscillation. I had bought the fan for $350 on sale and when you charge that much it should remember the state it was in when the fan was turned off. It remembered the power level. I have a 14 year old $50 fan that remembers if it was turning back and forth but a fan that costs hundreds more than the next expensive one doesn't.
I wrote the company about it and they said that's how it was designed. Well, they need someone to look at the user design of their products. I told Dyson that that I won't be buying any of their products because the human interface was flawed and I took the fan back to the store.
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This is what happens when you hire all young people that haven't learned the ropes, points missed, mistakes made. And engineers should have to use the products they designed wherever possible.
The customer is always right.
Illegal Age-ism Admitted in the Press! (Score:5, Interesting)
FTA: “The enthusiasm and lack of fear is important,” Dyson says. “Not taking notice of experts and plowing on because you believe in something is important. It’s much easier to do when you’re young.”
I work, effectively, in this very area of materials science. I publish in journals like Nature. I have written many patents, and own several myself.
Oh, but gosh, I am not 25 years old. I am, in Dyson's "We love to fail" world, useless. Expertise, knowledge, actual experience, quick hands in the lab, and so on are of no value to them. I doubt that they'd even look at my CV. At least, in its current form... Hmmn.
Why don't I apply? I'll omit dates from my degrees, and only include the last 5 years' experience, patents, and publications. At the interview, they'll see that I'm not 25 (I look 35, but am older). They'll ask for transcripts or photocopies of degrees at some point – HR's method of engaging in age discrimination without asking "what year were you born in?". At the in-person interview, they will learn my real age. They will drop me immediately.
Then, I will sue them for age discrimination. The owner and CEO has already publicly admitted it. I don't want a job at their shitty Edison-esque "try everything" R&D facility, but rather the salary and options that I could have made had they not engaged in their already admitted age discrimination.
Sound like a good plan?
Re:Illegal Age-ism Admitted in the Press! (Score:4, Insightful)
DAMN I wish I had karma to give you. I am by far the oldest member of my R+D team, and by far the most innovative and risk averse.
James Dyson is an asshole. He bleats about wanting more engineers, but he only want the cheap young ones he can pay as little as possible and toss aside. He isn't even a qualified engineer himself. People like Dyson say we need more engineers, but when the UK starting salary for grad engineers is between 26- 30K GBP , they are too cheap. Until we can make a real scarcity of engineers that isn't going to change
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you sound butthurt.
Dyson is a successful engineer and inventor. unlike you. news for you, young engineers make a lot of money.
Re:Illegal Age-ism Admitted in the Press! (Score:4, Interesting)
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I reckon Dyson's comment is merely to conceal the real reason: young engineers are cheap.
There are plenty of them, they are easily manipulated into working long hours.
They are disposable (and "Not taking notice of experts" means your operation will soon go broke: reinventing every wheel that the experienced guys in the neighbouring companies just take, off the shelf).
I doubt that if Dyson had shareholders to worry about, he would take this view. But since the company is his own personal play-thing, he's
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Let's see how that sounds with some other EEOC categories:
No, I don't think he would get away with publicly stating any of those as hiring preferences. Ye
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I bet he "values" young men all right.
Wonderful use of money (Score:2)
Making 26 YOs work 80 hour weeks is easier too... (Score:3)
Observation: it seems there are more places to buy refurbed Dyson vacuum cleaners and fans than there are places to buy them new. To me that suggests that they have terrible manufacturing and/or design quality, or that Dyson's marketing people have decided to charge a high price to the biters who are willing to buy a "new" Dyson vacuum cleaner or fan, and then sell "refurbs" to the unwashed masses who can't or won't buy a "new" unit.
Whatever is going on, the availability of all those refurbs has left me with an impression of poor quality. No thanks.
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I actually went backwards. I had a Dyson bagless back in Australia. When I moved overseas and needed to buy something while waiting for my stuff to arrive I went and got a run of the mill bagged vacuum. Not even a good one. I almost forgot how nice it is popping a bag out and putting it in the bin and not having to touch any of the stuff I just vacuumed off the floor.
I sold the Dyson when it arrived and kept the cheap vacuum. The only complain I do have, the Dyson was nicer to manoeuvre, but not that much n
Re:Making 26 YOs work 80 hour weeks is easier too. (Score:4, Informative)
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I was recently shopping for a vacuum to replace a couple "brand name", upright, bagless machines acquired over the years from Walmart or similar vendors. My two main reasons for replacement were the bagless systems were very dirty- emptying them involved holding it at arm's length over a trash can, taking a deep breath, opening the trap door and dropping the dirt into the trash in a cloud of dust. The other main complaint was the noise. Jeez, those things were awful. I couldn't stand to be in the house
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I agree they're not much good on a smooth floor, but I use a broom for that. They work very well in that environment. We've had a Dyson for a long time and aside from eating its skinny little belts trivially if you clog it with hair, it's a very good machine for us. And it pulls stuff out of the carpet that other vacs don't, which is its mission...
Went downhill fast! (Score:2)
Damn that summary started so bright and happy, saying all sorts of things that got me excited.. and then it just got sad. I guess old people are only good for running countries. Nothing important like trying to invent batteries
I hope it pays off (Score:2)
Dyson (Score:3)
I'd rather he built of of those spheres
This will beat Musk because of trust. (Score:2, Interesting)
With Dyson, I get the feeling that he doesn't want to rip off any engineering types as they are his people. He probably knows all the stories of where the business type and the engineer with the brilliant idea meet and somehow the engineer still can't afford a good soldering iron, yet the business type just bought
Ignorance as a virtue (Score:2)
Not taking notice of experts and plowing on because you believe in something is important. It's much easier to do when you're young
Ignorance of experience promoted as a virtue. While there, they could also skip science classes, as it may badly influence their spirits.
Won't work (Score:2)
If it was possible, Elon Musk would have done it already.
Da-Boom-Tish (Score:2)
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Re:We need this (Score:5, Interesting)
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You need both science and engineering, hopefully in a collaborative atmosphere where they are willing to talk about the challenges to make a piratical solution, then
I'm guessing either a spellcheck created "piratical" in your sentence or you were talking about needing both science and IP lawyers, not engineers.
Re: We need this (Score:2)
It'll certainly be harder to work on new tech with only one eye and a hook for a hand
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That's right! That's why my cell phone which uses more power than my cell phone of 10 years ago with a battery less than a third the size lasts significantly longer - because everyone's been "never doing anything with the research", right?
Good research results make news. Their employment in commercial product
Re:We need this (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll agree with your sentiment, if not your particular example. My old flip-phone from 10 years ago lasted about a week on a single charge. Obviously, though, that's because it was doing jack-crap processing-wise compared to the mini-supercomputers we now all have in our pockets, not due to a lack of progress in battery tech. I think many tech-types have just been spoiled by Moore's Law, not realizing how abnormal it is for technology to improve on an exponential scale.
Anyhow, I'm always glad to see more research into this field. A lot of our current tech is tethered to battery life, and batteries are, I think, going to be more and more important as we transition more toward renewable energy for much of our everyday power needs.
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But how many years of process shrinks, improved LEDs, better radios, higher capacity batteries, etc., has it been since that flip phone was made? If manufacturers were chasing battery life, instead of biggest screen, thinnest phone and fastest processor, we could easily have smartphones runnin
Re:We need this (Score:4, Insightful)
we need people actively looking into making those new type of batteries instead of just researching them and never do anything with the research
You haven't been paying attention.
Like photovoltaic solar panels (which can now be had for under a dollar a watt WITHOUT subsidies, more than an order of magnitude improvement over the last decade or so), DEPLOYED battery technology has been improving, drastically.
Of course most of the breakthroughs don't get deployed. That's usually because better breakthroughs come along before they get that far.
Re:Young engineers ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That and they have less to loose in case of failure. So they are willing to take more risks and perhaps get bigger rewards. Having a family while personally rewarding forced you to play it safer as failure will effect more than themselves.
Re:Young engineers ... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was teaching a kid SQL and he fell into an issue where his joins and where when he gave up and asked why he wasn't getting the proper results.
So I sketched the answer on a whiteboard in less than two minutes and explained how his joins and cases were excluding the data he wanted. He spent a few days on the issue trying to figure it out on his own.
When he asked me how the hell I figured out so fast I told him that I ran into the issue years ago and simply asked someone with experience.
Re: Young engineers ... (Score:2, Funny)
was his name Bobby, by any chance?
Re:Young engineers ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are those the ones where you draw a Ford Transit overlapping a Citroen Nemo?
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That and they have less to loose in case of failure. So they are willing to take more risks and perhaps get bigger rewards. Having a family while personally rewarding forced you to play it safer as failure will effect more than themselves.
Anyone with a foot out the door of the company they are working for is in the same boat. Once I realized that the company needs me more than I need them, I was a lot more willing to stand up to management and forcefully push for needed changes. I just didn't care if I lost at that point since I wasn't planning on sticking around.
I have been assigned a lot more responsibility since then. Maybe that's what it takes to be in management- boldness on the edge of recklessness.
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I have been assigned a lot more responsibility since then. Maybe that's what it takes to be in management- boldness on the edge of recklessness.
You're halfway there. Add a lack of knowledge of the scope of the problems but the willingness to throw out the latest buzzwords and you're a shoo-in for the C-suite.
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The enthusiasm and lack of fear is important. Not taking notice of experts and plowing on because you believe in something is important. It's much easier to do when you're fully funded
Fixed.
Age Discrimination (Score:2)
At least he's blatant about it.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/type... [eeoc.gov]
Re:Young engineers ... (Score:5, Funny)
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balanced out by not having a sense of responsibility, but hey, let's not keep score.
Re:Young engineers ... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is said that Microsoft in the early days hired only young fresh software engineers so they wouldn't be corrupted by "old school" thinking.
These engineers went on to build software that re-created every mistake in the book about how and OS should be designed and implemented.
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You not kidding... When I took cs back in the 90s my data structures teacher one day went on a yelling tirade on how windows 3.1 was a step backwards in design, then proceeded to backup his statements for the whole class. good times.
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These engineers went on to build software that re-created every mistake in the book about how and OS should be designed and implemented.
Microsoft had a client OS that ran on the hardware-challenged commodity PCs of the early eighties and nineties --- not a trivial achievement. It's future was not dependent on the success or failure of any single computer manufacturer --- and in the early days it presented a plausible and relatively straight-forward upgrade path from CP/M.
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It is said that Microsoft in the early days hired only young fresh software engineers so they wouldn't be corrupted by "old school" thinking
Or maybe the real reason is 'not having old/other school experience prevents the new engineers from comparing, seeing and reporting weaknesses in Microsoft structure/dev teams'.
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He must plan on hiring some pretty stupid engineers if it takes 3000 of them to design a battery.
Re: Young engineers ... (Score:2)
Have you ever used a Dyson product? They suck (except the ones that are supposed to).
Good news that this little battery company had its own R&D staff, perhaps some of them who've had some life experience. If they just need a billion dollars to succeed, then I'm all for it and hope Dyson profits handsomely.
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Re:Young engineers ... == Age discrimination. (Score:2)
Good news about the global population (Score:2)
Demographers agree that we are on course to seeing the world's population maxing out and starting to fall. We can debate as to whether we will survive peak population
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga... [bbc.co.uk]
Re:3000 engineers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also a lot of engineers that you can fire or layoff without causing shareholders to notice.
I don't know how good Dyson is good with HR. But those comments make it sound like it may be a tough job to keep.
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I bought a Dyson DC01 when they where first released, it was an excellent vacuum cleaner probably around 1993/1994 after two years the motor failed, I rang the company up to see how much a repair would cost and they fixed it for free.
Around 2004 we replaced it with a DC07 which we are still using.
The company projects a good ethos and talks about the importance of engineering. A+ will buy again eventually.
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As someone who has one of their vacuums: Fuck their over-complicated designs and their plastic, plastic, plastic everything.
Hell, they didn't even put a suitable cord on the thing. It gets blazingly hot in just a few minutes of use. It's also the most tangle-prone cord of all time.
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Oh, cool, that puts it much more into perspective. With an average age of 26, I imagine that they have equal representation between 46 year olds and 6 year olds.
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Salaries - $120k / eng / year -> 360 millions
Computer - $5000/eng -> 15 millions,
Real estate - 200sqft/eng, $40 / sqft.year ->.24 millions
Snacks - $80 / eng / month -> ~3 millions
That's about 400millions / year.