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Domain: popa.org

Stories and comments across the archive that link to popa.org.

Comments · 6

  1. Labor 101 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on US Patent Office Seeking Consultant That Can Stamp Out Fraud By Patent Examiners

    Form a union like the USPTO employees did Then management has no means to deal with slackers.

  2. Re:The Sky is Falling! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Every Day Is Goof-Off-At-Work Day At the US Patent and Trademark Office

    Nice attempt to head off critics of unions. Yes, examiners belong to a union. And yes, they get all the usual "protection" unions bring to people who goof off.

  3. Re:A patent examiner is GS-5 $38K job to start by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Prior Art On Verizon Patents

    Actually, that was as of September last year.

    In December, there was a 7% pay increase across the GS scales. In January there was another 1.8%.

    Don't forget the 4 year recruitment bonuses between $35,000 and $40,000.

    Take a look at:

    http://popa.org/txt/salary2007.txt (up-to-date salary info)
    http://usptocareers.gov/benefits.asp (stale salary, but up-to-date recruitment bonus info)

    They often do better than entry-level engineers...

  4. Re:An interesting Concept by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative · on EFF Runs Patent-Busting Challenge

    The employess are on very tight schedules as far as how long they can spend on each patent. If they don't meet a certain production requirement, they will be fired. The office as it currently stands puts a large focus on production over quality, although they are starting to focus more on quality (without giving any breaks to the production requirement, which probably isn't going to work).

    Read the POPA (Patent Office Professional Organization) newsletter for the last new years (issued bimonthly) to get a better understanding of what the USPTO is doing from an employee's point of view.

  5. You're right by ChartBoy · · Score: 1 · on Patent Office Shows Record Backlog
    A little digging (sites like Patent Office Professional Association) confirms your order of magnitude. Based on art and pay grade the range seems to run from 12-ish to the low 30's of hours expectancy.

    I noticed several complaints on the POPA site about expectancy remaining constant even though the number of shoes to search in the unit grew significantly.

  6. Re:What the patent office needs to do by mavenguy · · Score: 1 · on Publishing On Internet Patented

    The PTO is finding it difficult to retain Examiners. The management recently proposed a 10-15% pay increase in exchange for , among other things, eliminating all the paper files. This proposal was rejected by over 80% of examiners polled, recently. For a discussion of this and other issues from the Patent Examiner's point of view look at the POPA Website. BTW, I am not sure of the current statistics, but to reach 100% of their quota an examiner is allocated, on average, about 15 hours (the eactual figure depends on Grade and "Art"; Computers and Bioptecch get more, buggy whips less) to examine an application, from start to finish