Bagless Vacuum Inventor Wants More Engineers, Less Game Devs

[Simalacrum]

The man is right.

Seriously.

Our engineering (and scientific research) courses don't have enough funding as it is. We need far more encouragement in those sectors I believe, and in all brutal honesty, those sectors are far more important than the video game industry right now, especially with the real and serious threat of global warming: Britain needs good scientists and engineers to help confront very serious problems, and we're not giving them the funding they deserve.

 

[Zeren]

My vacuum cleaner is nearly a decade old and works just fine. I think we're good for vacuum cleaners. Games on the other hand, have a lot of kinks to work out.

My grandmother has a 40 year old Kirby vacuum like this one that works better than my five year old Dyson.

I think games are more worth the investment than overpriced vacuums Mr. Dyson.

 

[TheRealCJ]

Translation: A shortage of qualified engineers is creating an employee's market where labor is too expensive. Please create a glut of overeducated engineers so I can depress wages, and/or provide a government subsidy to lower my costs. After all, a vacuum cleaner is just as important as cultural products like music, film and games, right?

On second thought, from reading the thread it seems there is no such shortage, so I don't know what Dyson is on about.

Or, Or, Or, think about it like this: We have a LOT of great game designers... No so many great hardware engineers. Imagine if we had as many talented engineers as we did programmers? Maybe Kinect wouldn't suck, or we'd have consoles that can actually rival PCs for graphical quality.

 

[Darkness665]

Here in the US was have a solution. Let the government guarantee student loans by banks. Then charge too much interest. Threaten them repeatedly if they are unable to pay because there is no work. The wonderful Republican Party doesn't understand that giving students loans for zero percent would be better then burying the next generation in debt they cannot get out for twenty years. They just don't want to raise taxes on their rich friends, they would rather crush everybody else under foot.

And on the Video Game end. Do you realize how many game developers couldn't give you a requirements document to save their life, their mother's life, the life of their dog and cat or anybody they normally commute next to on a daily basis? Virtually all of them. There are so few engineers in that business I have no idea how he thought the two subjects were connected in anyway.

 

[TheRealCJ]

old janitor flames government

if he wants to impress me, the title should be:

old janitor creates 60,000 jobs

the fact that we've spent as long playing games and watching tv as there has been time is quite true
man hours rack up really quick, do the math on one or two online games and your head will explode!

but people need leisure time and thus leisure must be created, without it we'd either go insane or
become mindless drones, endlessly gluing parts to vacuum cleaners on a never ending assembly line
and it's none of Dyson's business where, when or on what people spend their leisure time

if gaming hasn't become an obsession in your life that you shrug all other duty's to do it then
frankly power to you

Congratulations on having no idea how the real world works.

 

[TheRealCJ]

He makes a point, of sorts, but I can't help but feel like this is sour grapes from the guy that sells vacuums for $3,000 a pop

Might be more concerned with his own business than the future of technology

and those bladeless fans, you could fill a whole room with ordinary fans for the price of one of those things. I think the engineers in Britain's future should work towards taking what he makes and making it far more affordable. Also because it's obligatory in a topic like this Dyson as a company sucks, their overpriced stuff blows.

If only we could, but he patents damn near every component.

OT: This smacks a bit of all those people out there who go "All those NASA scientists are wasting their time, they should go cure cancer or something".

Except I'll bet that "Overtly British" isn't the point of "britishness" as defined by this thing.

I'd imagine a game about the SAS (Say, like, CoD 4) could probably Qualify. or a game simply set in Britain. You've gotta admit, when it comes to games, almost all titles have an overtly American mindset. Hell, Britain's biggest game developer sets ALL their games in America.

 

[RJ 17]

I'd love to play a game based on Monty Python humor. :3

 

[Jfswift]

Maybe Dyson should make games.. about vacuums.

 

[Farther than stars]

Quick English lesson: "Bagless-vacuum inventor" with a hyphen is good grammar, but "bagless vacuum inventor" without a hyphen is bad slander (because slander is never good when it comes to journalistic standards, despite my personal feelings about Dyson in this situation).

 

[Singularly Datarific]

I'm an engineering student. He should stop whining and hire me

Mr. Dyson, hire me too. I want to engineer stuff, we're out here.

 

[MetalMagpie]

I studied Electronic Engineering at university, while my boyfriend studied Mechanical Engineering. Our experience (and the experience of other people on both our courses) is that it's really hard to get an engineering job in this country.
.

I'm going to assume you're in the UK since Lord Dyson is British. The rate of employment within the industry from 6 months after graduation in Strathclyde university's EE/ME dept. is 90%

90% of people who got their bachelor's or master's degree got a relevant job.

Your statement is less true for the field of engineers than any other field.

I am in the UK. And it sounds like Strathclyde University has a lot to be proud of (or a very good PR team). That said, accountancy is often classified as a "relevant" job for engineering students as as their degrees are highly regarded by accountancy firms. And the last figures I saw were that - across the entire country - fewer than 50% of engineering students get a job directly related to their degree.

It's possible that much of the problem myself and my boyfriend experienced was that we (and a number of others on my course) didn't want to build weapons. Of the students I knew who had an engineering job lined up for after they finished university, all but one were either being employed by the military or by weapons manufacturers (and the one exception was moving to Germany).

It may also be a problem that is a lot worse in London (our search area) than anywhere else, but it's still galling for my boyfriend to constantly hear that the country is "desperate for engineering students" when he had to fight so hard for a job and gets paid only slightly better than if he hadn't bothered to go to university at all.

 

[BlackStar42]

The UK government recently announced plans for a 25 percent tax break for "video games, animation and high-end television industries" that pass a "cultural test" proving their Britishness.

OK, I know this is going off-topic, but for fuck's sake this pisses me off...

"Britishness" is not a thing! Our culture is not an easily definable entity that can be measured by a test; and even if it could, I can't be the only one who thinks that art that can 'prove' it's 'Britishness' (aka. Art that is patriotic and supports the notion of whatever the hell our government seems to think "Britishness" is) being given preferential treatment is pretty fucking creepy. This isn't all that far away from what Iran is doing with it's game industry, because who needs honest artistic expression when you can have propaganda right? This shit would not fly in the British film industry that's for sure.

Britain is historically one of the most multi-cultural places on Earth. If there's anything about British culture that we should be celebrating, it's how malleable we are. The sort of skin-head, flag-touting bigots who like to make such a big deal about what it means to be truly 'British', don't seem to realise that to be 'British' is to be, ethnically speaking, equal parts Italian, German, Danish and French, at least! Asking anyone or anything to 'prove Britishness' is nothing more than empty, xenophobic, nationalistic wank-speak to appease clueless Daily Mail readers!

Right, I'm done. I'll get off my soapbox now.

Don't have much more to say really, that was...beautiful.

Does anyone happen to know how the chemical industry in the UK is doing? I'd quite like a job at the end of my degree.

 

[Olas]

Luigi has never felt so conflicted.

 

[DanielBrown]

Drawing them away from everything imo.
Had a friend in school with good grades that wanted to be a nurse. Not respectful as a guy, unfortunetly, however it's a decent job where you get to help people. When he didn't get in the first year(7th reserve out of a few thousand iirc) he instead decided to go to a game developer school because... He likes to play games. Told him a few times that it was a shit decision due to the extreme popularity and lack of work places in Sweden, but he didn't listen. Suggested that he should pick studying code instead of design, since the former would be more useful(also because his art was on the level of a child, but I didn't tell him that). Still didn't listen.

Fast forward four years: now he works at a call center or something.

I know it was none of my fucking business, but I cared about him and think it's a damn shame what happened.

 

[Callate]

Are any major industrialized countries not suffering from a lack of new engineering grads? China, maybe?

With all due respect to Dyson (who is, by most accounts, quite a remarkable designer, inventor, and engineer), the fields aren't necessarily cross-compatible. Just because someone is good at designing enemy AI or polygonal models doesn't automatically mean they'd be a whiz at, say, designing objects for optimal wind-resistance if they just applied themselves differently.

 

[The Lugz]

old janitor flames government

if he wants to impress me, the title should be:

old janitor creates 60,000 jobs

the fact that we've spent as long playing games and watching tv as there has been time is quite true
man hours rack up really quick, do the math on one or two online games and your head will explode!

but people need leisure time and thus leisure must be created, without it we'd either go insane or
become mindless drones, endlessly gluing parts to vacuum cleaners on a never ending assembly line
and it's none of Dyson's business where, when or on what people spend their leisure time

if gaming hasn't become an obsession in your life that you shrug all other duty's to do it then
frankly power to you

Congratulations on having no idea how the real world works.

if you know how it should be done,
run for government until then we use the old standby of supply and demand

there is demand for entertainment, thus it is profitable to create games thus we need games devs
because that makes our economy work: money > tax > grants > education > jobs > repeat

it's little use training 100k engineers if there are only 20k jobs because all you've done then is wasted government money on loans and grants to fund education that is then being wasted
to sit these engineers on their ass and live off the dole or for them to get crap jobs in a local fast fit
that they barely live off and cant afford their loan repayments
the demand must exist or there is no money to fund it

if people were more interested in cars, technology and practical toys there would me more demand for engineering
in leisure equipment instead of coders for the technology that already exists

the way to do this is with government grants and advertising, but seeing as were barely making profit in a recession
you cant just spend the whole education budget on advertising to sell whatever product you're trying to make popular
to invest jobs in for the long term returns, it just isn't economically viable to add debt to debt
so what we need is a cash in for future funding and the way to do that is to exploit revenue from a cash crop
like gaming so you can have these big government intensives to advance technology later

the job market is pretty dire in the uk at the moment, and i'm in the crowd suffering with my engineering nvq's and having zero available jobs in my area so what am i doing? training Bachelor's in software development so i can go into robotics or It instead

so i go back to my original statement, make the jobs and i'll be impressed until then it's just another guy
moaning about how things are run and doing little to remedy the situation

 

[Vault101]

Want to make video games? Go back to learning physics and not "Video game design". It will serve you better in the future when 343i reject you from the team for Halo 6

I dont get what your saying.....eather way I dont get the connection between engineering and videogame design in regards to choosing one or the other

that sounds more like a problem with the degree/coarse itself or what specific coarse people thin they are suposed to get

 

[Ruley]

Want to make video games? Go back to learning physics and not "Video game design". It will serve you better in the future when 343i reject you from the team for Halo 6

I dont get what your saying.....eather way I dont get the connection between engineering and videogame design in regards to choosing one or the other

that sounds more like a problem with the degree/coarse itself or what specific coarse people thin they are suposed to get

I'm not suggesting you choose one or the other, i'm urging people to choose scientific subjects over videogame design. My point is that a more general scientific degree like Maths, Physics, Engineering and computer science can still get you into the videogames industry (See Bungie, Treyarch, Lionhead Studios - all have people with physics degrees). By specializing in videogame design, i believe you are hurting you future job prospects by specializing too early. If you still want to do some form of education in videogame design, my advice would be to do a science degree then a one year conversion course of videogame coding (for example).

That way, if you get fed up of being a videogame designer or simply cannot find a job in the area, you can go elsewhere with you physics degree with a wide variety of job prospects still open to you.

Also i should point out that i'm not saying a videogame design degree wont get you a job in the industry. It probably will, if theirs jobs available. If not, you'd be hard pressed to apply that specialist sounding degree elsewhere.

 

[Vault101]

I'm not suggesting you choose one or the other, i'm urging people to choose scientific subjects over videogame design. My point is that a more general scientific degree like Maths, Physics, Engineering and computer science can still get you into the videogames industry (See Bungie, Treyarch, Lionhead Studios - all have people with physics degrees). By specializing in videogame design, i believe you are hurting you future job prospects by specializing too early. If you still want to do some form of education in videogame design, my advice would be to do a science degree then a one year conversion course of videogame coding (for example).

unless you want to do 3d modelling/animation

I kind of get what your saying, I actually know very little about the ACTUAL jobs people do in the game industry aside from the 3d modeling/animation/adding pretty effects stuff (even then I'm sketchy..was that a pun?...no probably not)

Drawing them away from everything imo.
Had a friend in school with good grades that wanted to be a nurse. Not respectful as a guy, unfortunetly, however it's a decent job where you get to help people. When he didn't get in the first year(7th reserve out of a few thousand iirc) he instead decided to go to a game developer school because... He likes to play games. Told him a few times that it was a shit decision due to the extreme popularity and lack of work places in Sweden, but he didn't listen. Suggested that he should pick studying code instead of design, since the former would be more useful(also because his art was on the level of a child, but I didn't tell him that). Still didn't listen.

I know it was none of my fucking business, but I cared about him and think it's a damn shame what happened.

I'm kind of against telling people "no you shouldnt do x there are no jobs" I mean the advice has its good sides but overall it doesnt seem like a good way to aproach life

in your freinds case though it doesnt sound like he was really suited to it or at least went about it in not the best way, enjoying games and having the passion to make them are very different things, I consider myself a creative person (the skill part is a work in progress) and I love games but I have no desire to make one (unless I was the head of a AAA studio with a big budget and I had complete creative controll over everthing...but lets be real here)

 

[Blaster395]

The UK government recently announced plans for a 25 percent tax break for "video games, animation and high-end television industries" that pass a "cultural test" proving their Britishness.

OK, I know this is going off-topic, but for fuck's sake this pisses me off...

"Britishness" is not a thing! Our culture is not an easily definable entity that can be measured by a test; and even if it could, I can't be the only one who thinks that art that can 'prove' it's 'Britishness' (aka. Art that is patriotic and supports the notion of whatever the hell our government seems to think "Britishness" is) being given preferential treatment is pretty fucking creepy. This isn't all that far away from what Iran is doing with it's game industry, because who needs honest artistic expression when you can have propaganda right? This shit would not fly in the British film industry that's for sure.

Britain is historically one of the most multi-cultural places on Earth. If there's anything about British culture that we should be celebrating, it's how malleable we are. The sort of skin-head, flag-touting bigots who like to make such a big deal about what it means to be truly 'British', don't seem to realise that to be 'British' is to be, ethnically speaking, equal parts Italian, German, Danish and French, at least! Asking anyone or anything to 'prove Britishness' is nothing more than empty, xenophobic, nationalistic wank-speak to appease clueless Daily Mail readers!

Right, I'm done. I'll get off my soapbox now.

Before you jump to conclusions about how the Government is a jingoistic racist propaganda-promoting machine, perhaps you should do more research beyond looking at the word "Britishness" and ranting about it.

Unlike you, I actually did some research on what this "Cultural test" is. Source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/383106/uk-tax-breaks-video-games-cultural-test-revealed/

To summerize, very little of the test is even British. In fact, almost all games likely qualify, and it is closer to a European Economic Area test.

You need to get 16 points across the following categories:
Location, depending on % of the game set in specific locations. Max 4 if you set it in the EEA, Max 3 if the location is entirely unspecified.
Characters, Max of four points if leads are from EEA or an unspecified location.
Story, 4 points for relating to any EEA state
Language, up to 4 points based on use of regional dialects
Contribution, up to 4 points based on development of british culture (basically, monty python references will get you 4 points)
Where the work is carried out, up to 3 points for developing the game in the UK
Up to 8 points for the people working on the video game actually living in the UK.

So lets see how far we can stretch this point system. Imagine the following scenario:
I am an Indie developer in the UK making a game about sentient floating boxes in a void. I get 3 points for the 100% unspecified location. 4 points for the unspecified character's homeplace. 4 points considering I am using British English as the games dialogue. 3 points for the game being entirely developed in the UK, and 8 points since I technically fulfil every job position as a 1-man indie dev team. That comes to a total of 22 points.

A game about sentient floating boxes in a void is sufficiently British to pass the test.

Basically any game being developed in the UK by UK citizens will get 15 of the 16 needed points simply from development location, hired staff and language.