Dyson opens Britain’s first degree where students get paid
thememo.com
thememo.com
It's far more useful than the current University arrangement, where 'everyone' gets to pay money to drink for 3 years (whilst studying) and then either drop back into the market looking for useful work, or go on to spend even more time making Academia seem worthwhile.
We used to be world leaders in engineering and production in the UK - now we just have students everywhere, with no jobs to go to as we import pretty much everything.
Okay - slightly over-dramatic, but at least Dyson is trying to do something useful.
As shallow as it sounds though, it is bloody good fun.
Or 4 years here in Scotland - which reminds me that the university department where I studied and worked was in the Grassmarket of Edinburgh - which is an exceptional location for boozing.
A surprisingly large amount of it is in really unglamorous buildings in industrial estates outside cities other than London. Since the media have largely stopped bothering to leave the M25, it's invisible.
(I have a pet theory based on the car industry that the really toxic thing is British labour relations; there are successful small British companies, and successful large plants with foreign owners, but all the British-managed mass-employment industries collapsed in strikes and/or were looted by the directors like MG Rover.)
I don't think that many people will disagree with you on this theory.
Every large company in the UK has a significant union. Not every large company has failed. Some company failures have been exacerbated by unions, british leyland being one example.
The really toxic thing is financial short termism. It used to be results in a year, which was very bad. Now they want results in under a quarter which is to value generation as acid to chalk.
The systemic reason for this was the high value of the pound though. This dose of Dutch disease was avoided in Germany that has managed to repress the value of its currency in a variety of different ways.
If the Dyson IoT does these things that other employers claim they want (soft skills etc) but aren't willing to train or pay for then Dyson's new venture will probably succeed handsomely in the long run.
[0] http://www.economist.com/news/business/21606834-many-countri...
EDIT: fixed typos
There's loyalty and cash. In Germany they still have control on their wages.
The downside is when all your mates are out having fun, you're being worked to the bone! Not really fun for an 18 year old.
Trade apprenticeship (typically started at 14 /15 ) Higher / Professional apprenticeship BSC/ BA in Engineering
You could join the path at any point or go through all 3 stages
We have a couple working in our office, and I've been hugely impressed by them
https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/apprenticeships/students/digital--tec...
Hah.
1. We need lots of skilled people.
2. We have lots of people lacking skills.
Importing talent solves problem (1) (and grows the economy and is generally and genuinely a good thing). But problem (2) remains. Why not try to solve both at once?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/1218...
If there's no clause about having to work for Dyson after the program, then it will be a no-brainer for engineering students. I wonder if the normal structures of career centers will still be present/emphasized, since I'm sure Dyson would not be interested in its grads seeking employment at competitors.
Edit: Actually maybe it is accredited. From the Dyson Institute's FAQs: "What is the Dyson Institute of Technology?
The Dyson Institute of Technology teaches high quality engineering degrees to the next generation of tech enthusiasts, alongside a full time role at Dyson.
During this four year programme you’ll learn about engineering through hands-on experience in our Research and Development department with academic training provided by WMG, the University of Warwick. You'll graduate with a Bachelor of Engineering degree."
If you graduate and gain enough experience on the job (probably more cost effective than being at uni for another year) to be considered to have an equivalent standard of education I believe you can become a CEng with a presentation.
Is that supposed to mean: that any accreditation by UofWarwick somehow applies to Dyson as well? The FAQ simply doesn't mention any accreditation whatsoever specifically for Dyson. Could be rather important, one way or the other.
(Note to non-Brits: "college" in the UK is mostly for lower-level and vocational courses, it's not a synonym for university like in the US)
It looks great, and I'm sure it will be a great education for the lucky few, but I am skeptical that it would scale to larger numbers. The incentives are there at the macro level but not the micro which would be needed to encourage a broad range of companies to participate.
Dyson have all the interests to do so, as it will attract talent and every drop of the student's time is devoted to learn material that will be 100% applicable to their day to day functions in the enterprise.
In more general terms, if all education worked this way we'll only be studying the inner workings of vacuum cleaners (or computers, or anything else that is a commercial product) and not abstract math, theoretical physics or philosophy. It might work in this particular case, but a society should be vigilant in not selling out to commercial entities all means of education.
Again, I am very happy of this particular project and hope it can reduce unemployment -- but wary of saying "Aha! Why don't we do this everywhere!?"
So I ended up getting a degree after starting work as an apprentice. The days of an allowance are long gone, Uni degrees now cost here, but not as much as the folks across the pond seem to pay from what I can gather.
Would I have gone to uni in todays conditions? probably. would I have finished - hard to say, 3 years of scrabbling for money would have perhaps changed things.
The bit I can't figure out is why in the 70's and 80's we could afford that, but now we can't. I suspect it's peoples life style expectations, and the greed of those who earn money to not want to pay taxes. I don't like paying tax any more than the next person but if you want a functioning society taxes are necessary and the only way of redistributing wealth.
https://www.studyinternational.com/news/uk-computer-science-...
http://blog.hefce.ac.uk/2015/07/08/unemployment-among-comput...
“For a long time we wondered why more people didn’t major in computer science,” Alex Aiken, chair of Stanford University’s Computer Science Department, told Times Higher Education. “Everyone in the field believed it was the future and that [it] represented an important way of thinking. Now the world believes us, and we have an overwhelming number of students.”
I've seen 3rd year students unable to fix a basic java compilation error in their own program. No reasonable CS graduate I know is unemployed.
Its called curriculum, and is comfortably standardized for all students so you can find the best easily. Otherwise you would need to compare among random arbitrary sets of skills, different for each one of your candidates and this would be for companies basically like playing blind chicken to hire a candidate.
You need still to show demonstrable skills is often a way to say "I expect you to work for free until you realize that this is the real game here. I will replace you with the next hungry guy in the queue". Is just a mean to obtain the same cheaper, or free.
If I could prove to you that I was awarded a CS degree from a UK university, would that be sufficient for you to agree to employ me?
Recruitment should be put in the right context. The best recruiter have an evening, or a few hours to figure out if you are a good fit or if you have any skills. If you have a bad day, your recruiter don't liked your face or he/she wants to remain the big fish in a small pond; you fall under the radar.
Your teachers instead had four years for "recruit you". They have see you performing in solitary and in group; know if you have any real skills or not or if you have problems with the other studens. They understand you much better that any recruiter; is their job.
The job of a recruiter is having the position filled at the lowest price possible. They need the psychological tricks to make the process random again and put pressure on the candidate. To be able to cheat the tests or to seduce your recruiter is not a skill that the company needs. Is just smoke. Unsusprisingly a lot of those swans turn into ugly ducklings just after being hired.
pvaldes: here you are the results of my 100 exams, that I passed sucessfully. In an officially certified document, easy to authenticate.
me: If I could prove to you that I was awarded a CS degree from a UK university, would that be sufficient for you to agree to employ me?
pvaldes: If your scores were high, probably yes.
So it seems that you and ropiku _agree_ that a CS degree _isn't_ enough.
Where you differ is that you want to see scores above some threshold (although I can't imagine how you'd standardise those across 100+ UK universities), and ropiku wants to see someone write some Java code. Both seem reasonable approaches, but the latter seems a little easier and more reliable.
Is Python a different language if written in Cardiff, Liverpool or Plymouth?
No, but that has zero relevance to the comparability of scores between universities.
For some jobs yes, of course; for other I don't think so.
If you have a soft spot for elitism and want to have universities ranked by categories you can have it. Is universally standardized, as I said before. You could hire people only of universities ranking in prime number positions if you want. Is your choice.
If you want simply to hire somebody able to code in the language X, you could just take a quick look at the curriculum of your candidate and see if that language was teached in his/her university, what contents have been teached (can find it in the web of the university) and how the guy/girl scored, so... what is the problem exactly?
Do you think that to make them repeat the same tests is a good way to spend the money of your company and your time as employer? Is your company a wannabe-university? Do you feel better qualified to score correctly a candidate than the teacher that spent 30 years doing exactly that job?
- CS degrees are not standardised, i.e. you cannot directly conclude anything based on the graduate's degree grade or individual scores, without additional information (e.g. the institution where they studied).
- Just because someone has a CS degree, that's not enough for you to decide to hire them. You need additional information.
Do you disagree with either of those points?
In most countries they are, by law. Is the basis of the educative system. Degrees are certified and strongly regulated by the government. I can't just print and flash one without a license to emit degrees. This would be to falsificate a public document, wich is a crime in most countries in the world, if not all.
In those countries you can't discriminate something for a public job based only in their university, this would be also illegal. Any degree of type "X" emited by a valid institution must de accepted if you ask for an degree of type "X". All are equivalent. In many fields, physicians for example, you can't work without a degree. But you can work as physician in UK with a Spanish or Chinese degree for example, because this is regulated. Private companies of course can lie themselves in any way as they want. Is their money after all.
Your reality may be different.
> You cannot directly conclude anything based on the graduate's degree grade
If your candidate show a CS degree, you can directly conclude that this people have skills related with computer science, and related with having a CS degree. You don't know if he/she is able to drive a truck, this is true.
> or individual scores
Also standardized.
> Without eg. the institution where they studied.
Information casually written in big fat letters in the CS degree.
The standard to achieve a given degree grade (e.g. Upper Second) varies between institutions.
As for individual scores, these are often not even on the same scale. Some universities use numerical scores; others use alpha/beta/gamma.
If you accept the above, but still believe that UK CS degrees are standardized, then it's likely you and I assign different meanings to the word 'standardized'.
http://www.btplc.com/Careercentre/Ourlocations/UK/Apprentice...
And many other companies as well.
- work in a high tech campus - work on projects for the company - go to lectures - get a degree - from a University
I am all for the Dyson initiative, but people should be more aware that this is an option!
Because, if they do, Dyson might actually also have a strong influence over their salary and other forms of compensation and benefits once they do.
For fields like software engineering I believe it is the best way to get a proper education.
http://machinedesign.com/news/industrial-design-design-dyson... :
> As it happened, Dyson was also having suction problems at the factory which made his Ballbarrow, a wheelbarrow he invented that uses a ball instead of a wheel. There, overspray of an epoxy powder was collected on an 8 8-ft cloth screen in front of a gigantic fan with a three-phase motor — a sort-of giant vacuum cleaner. Production had to stop every hour to brush out the screen and gather the powder for reuse. Otherwise, the screen would clog and powder would fly all over the factory.
> The spray-equipment maker said large industrial users collected airborne debris in a cyclone. The cyclone, it turned out, was a 30-ft-high cone that spun dust out of the air using centrifugal force — the kind of thing you might see on top of a saw mill.
> Under cover of darkness, Dyson went to a nearby sawmill, climbed the fence, and “surveyed at close hand the gigantic symbol of my future.” He made some sketches and climbed all over it to learn how it worked, what its proportions were, and what it was made of.
> The next day, Dyson and his workers welded a 30-ft cyclone together from sheets of steel and attached it to the roof. He “gleefully” tore the cloth screen from the opening of the duct and started the conveyor. The overspray “went straight into the gaping hole, up the [duct work] and around the walls at the top of the cyclone, spiraling down through the inverted cone to be collected by a bag at the bottom, while the air escaped into the sky. Production went on and on, with no stoppages until the end of the day,” says Dyson.
> The similarity between ripping off the cloth filter and tossing out a vacuum-cleaner bag was obvious. It also occurred to him there was “no reason why it shouldn’t work in miniature, using a cyclone about the size of, say, a Perrier bottle.” That night, Dysonmodeled a foot-long version of the cyclone out of cardboard and duct tape. He covered the large end, leaving a hole in the top for the escaping air. Then, he attached a short length of hose to the discharge hole of the machine (where the bag had been) and connected it to the top of the cyclone, which was fixed to the shaft of the cleaner. The world’s only bagless vacuum cleaner worked flawlessly.
In tech, we bemoan laws against technological breaking and entering with a view to learn about how things work (we call it reverse engineering), but applied to mechanical engineers this is not right?
While I understand the law regarding trespass is different, this is just a means to an end.
I think your argument would hold more weight if you could elaborate more on the patent and monopoly stuff, but instead you focus on the act and context of learning how the cyclone works.