BYD throws 5,000 low-cost engineers at auto battery packs

Regarding Michael H's comments above - I too have first hand experience with working with "cheaper" overseas engineers. Unfortunately, due to my lack of seniority within the company I work for, I am one of the unfortunates who is given a shovel and told to fix the problems created by the influx of bananas and monkeys.

I've had first hand experience on how throwing 5,000 graduate Chinese engineers at a problem works. I am reminded of an old evolution Vs creation argument that looked at the concept of employing a million monkey's typing randomly at a million typewriters in the hope of recreating the entire works of William Shakespere. You can work out the probibility of how long it will take - and sure enough it is a scientifically valid concept on how to create great literary works - you can assume that the monkey's will also recreate other great works like "war and peace" along with some new original great literacy works. The only problem is that the monkey's will also create a whole load of crap that you will then need a huge team of literate proof readers to work through in order to seperate the chaff from the wheat. A million monkey's eat a huge amount of bananas and cleaning up all of their excrement is quite a task!

As a person who works at a multi-national Telco company with a large Chinese Engineering staff, I can tell you that these guys work very hard, typically 6 days a week 10-12 hours a day. The quality of their work is not up to US standards, but they hammer on designs until they get stuff right. To me it is a very disturbing trend that we are moving engineering work to low cost areas. Our competitor, a chinese telco company will put two teams on a design project and then make the teams compete to get the project completed. The losing team members lose their jobs, so it creates a brutal and competitive environment. We don't want to sink their level.

At least BYD is actively involved in getting a battery product to market and seems will succeed as I write. I seem to remember in the 1950''s most people laughing at Japans efforts and consdering their product cheap imitations? And very quickly they produced high quality electronics and reliable rustless cars which for some reason US could or would not do...... Good luck to our hard working Asian collegues, they will deserve their success when it comes...I''d just love to see the grumbling stop here in the USA and once again we should try to develop a serious engineering base. But it seems most of our bright young college grads seem attracted to the Law and Wall St...What a waste of wonderful US home grown talent... Mind you it''s no wonder since corporate America has exported such a great deal of Engineers positions to offshore sites and in doing lowered the wage scales for US engineers.

All, I am disappoint at your comments. 600$ is enough for a new graduated student. And they will learn a lot from experianced people. How to manage 5000 people. Accuatlly BYD has over 10,000 people, we are managing them very well.

A cup of coffee costing costing 25 cent in Shanghai can be better than on costing $10 in Newyork. It is just different cost base.

why ask for comments if you are not going to publish them.

BYD would be a great company in three years.

4096 people x 1 day = 4096 man days = 19.5 man years. So yes, your statement is correct, however misguided.

Aparently they have forgotten that several years ago IBM proved conclusivly that 4096 people working one day on the same project do not equal a "Man Year" worth of development.

I had the great opportunity to work alongside some of China''s young engineers in their own environment. They turned out prototypes of my brainstorming ideas overnight, when it would have taken at least 3-4 weeks in the US in the best design shops. Ignorance is bliss until you''re unemployed...

But the quality control of products coming out of China is reality. I believe China will go through the same process that Japan and then Korea experienced. That is, cheaply made products built by low paid workers, a realization that low prices and crappy products won''t keep consumers, a push towards improving quality (prices rise), products mature and improve, and cheap manufacturing goes off searching the globe for the next "China".

It''s like buying 5,000 lottery tickets and still not winning the draw. Who does win in all this is the US engineer, since 5,000 Chinese are being kept busy on a boondoggle. Next, let''s throw 10,000 Chinese PhDs at Cold Fusion...please!

This is the company that Warren Buffet recently invested in. Interesting to see this anouncment, looks like they cashed Berkshire's check.

I think it is unwise to assume that low salaries automatically equate to lower quality. A lot of good work is done in universities by relatively poorly paid graduate students. Local housing means no commuting costs and hassles! However, I agree with Meredith that managing this raw engineering horsepower effectively, will be critical.