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Every Day Is Goof-Off-At-Work Day At the US Patent and Trademark Office
McGruber writes An internal investigation by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office found that some of its 8,300 patent examiners repeatedly lied about the hours they were putting in and many were receiving bonuses for work they did not do. While half of the USPTO's Patent Examiners work from home full time, oversight of the telework program — and of examiners based at the Alexandria headquarters — was "completely ineffective," investigators concluded. The internal investigation also unearthed another widespread problem. More than 70 percent of the 80 managers interviewed told investigators that a "significant" number of examiners did not work for long periods, then rushed to get their reviews done at the end of each quarter. Supervisors told the review team that the practice "negatively affects" the quality of the work. "Our quality standards are low," one supervisor told the investigators. "We are looking for work that meets minimal requirements." Patent examiners review applications and grant patents on inventions that are new and unique. They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees. They earn at the top of federal pay scale, with the highest taking home $148,000 a year.
Patent US 9063520 A: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
A method and system for under-performing approval of patents.
Seriously? You're posting this here without telling me how I can get this job? From the sounds of it, I could do it in the background while at my real job.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
... that one of them will find the successor of General Relativity in his goof-off time :-)
Congress will investigate this of course and I wonder if thePTO will have the balls to say they can't find their emails.
I know someone who works there, and they complain quite a bit not just about some of the other workers but also a lot of the folk semi-external to the office on whom they have to rely. Not exactly useful information, I know, but it makes me wonder.
I can only hope that these experts rushing to get their reviews done quickly at the end of the quarter can be replaced by pattern matching AI. Their results if rushed have huge implication in the million s and billions for certain industries. Also, is there any tracking of who has which patents to review? Is the person filing the patent ever allowed to have communication with the reviewer? I would imagine there is plenty of room for bribery or pay off to let a certain patent review through.
And like most notoriously poor patents granted; they will not reveal details of their goof-up; or how it works. Nobody else can copy their style of work since they have design patents on those things as well.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
of why small-government types are not completely out of their fucking gourd.
I used to work at the patent office, and I can tell you the article doesn't quite understand the way the office works. Examiners are required to get a very specific amount of cases done for the hours they work or they are fired. They seriously total up the hours worked and require X number of cases done based on it. At worst what is happening is that people are slacking off at the beginning of a quarter and then working extra at the end to make up for it. But it's not like they never do any work. If someone doesn't make their counts, as they call it, they are pretty quickly in trouble.
So the worst here is that some examiners might be doing a bad job at the end of a quarter because they slacked off at the beginning of it. Even still, there's a lot of other reasons why someone might get less counts at the beginning of a quarter. They might be working on their harder cases early, for example, because they're not up against a deadline. Or they might be hanging on to cases they've worked on just to think them over -- since they aren't really due yet. So it's hard to say what's really going on here. There are definitely some bad examiners but there's no way people are never working or they wouldn't get their counts and they'd be fired.
I was recruited by a friend for a patent examiner position. Glad I declined because instead I get to spend my time surfing slashdot instead.
How is that different in private sector? Article implies that this problem is only widespread in the government sector, when in my experiences this is global problem rooted in 'human condition'.
I would have thought this Obvious given that Einstein developed the theory of Relativity, revolutionizing nearly every field of science, all while working there.
Let's see... light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity... ...which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body...
er...
Icons with round corners? Approved...
One click purchase? Whatever... approved...
That is, light in vacuum propagates with the speed c...
As a reviewer for USPTO, I can tell you that it's far worse than this article portrays.
Typically, I don't do an ounce of work until my deadline is coming up. Then I just diarrhea though my queue, spending less than 10 seconds on a typical application. If you want an analogy, think of it as filing 90% of your work email based on subject alone. I do give more attention to certain applications (the 10% of email you actually read, using the same analogy). These typically fall into one of three categories:
1: Applications that look interesting/entertaining to me.
2: Applications that are a refile of a previously rejected one.
3: Applications that hit the top of my queue when I'm bored of rubber stamping a bunch. Reading the damned things and doing my job actually becomes a break from the monotony of approve approve approve reject approve approve reject.
From what I've seen, this pattern of work is typical. A major compounding factor is the fact that if you reject an application, it's likely to come back and be noticed, but if you approve an application, no one notices. So when you're blitzing through shit you typically want to approve shit unless it's absurd. And if it's ridiculously absurd, you'll want to approve it - we used to hold a competition to see who could approve the most ridiculous patent each deadline. I've stopped doing it since 2 of the people I worked with left, but I know this practice goes on with other groups of reviewers.
Management knows this shit goes on but is powerless to stop it because it means someone would have to actually review the patents, and the managers sure as shit aren't going to even look at them unless it's from a high profile company. All they care about is the numbers. Total number reviewed is king, but they do look at the % approved, too. There are no targets or quotas for % approved, but if you're actually doing your job you'll get shit from your manager because your % approved is going to be significantly lower than average. So you learn to approve shit that's obviously retarded. The "reasoning" behind this is that we're reviewing the validity of the application itself first, the overlap with existing patents second, and novelty/originality last. Anything questionable with regards to novelty/originality is better left to the courts.
The last thing I'll mention is how badly patents are written. Go ahead and look some terrible patents up. Those vague descriptions and those wonky diagrams with little to no coherent explanation are intentional. They're not written that way to be broad, as most people say. If it ever comes to a point of contention, the lawyers will fight that part out anyway. They're written that way in order to be approved quickly. Reviewers do not have to understand a patent application to approve it. If you approve a patent for a triangle and somehow catch shit for it, you can just claim you misunderstood the diagrams. And I can guarantee you, in a patent for a triangle there will be a lot of ridiculous, incomprehensible diagrams.
Seriously? You're posting this here without telling me how I can get this job?
So what you are saying is the astroturfing to get more people to apply for positions at the USPTO is working?
Oh random government-worker hater modded up. Must be a Monday on slashdot.
It's insightful because no private sector workers ever goofed off, or spent the "work from home" days, grazing from the fridge, playing halo. And no public sector worker ever ever rushed through a piece of late work and did a half assed job.
Ever.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
"Anyone who works from home is masturbating all day. I know this because I work from home."
~ Lewis Black
There aren't 8300 people working on each patent application. The USPTO received 609,052 patent applications last year. There are (roughly) 200 working days in a calendar year (accounting for sick leave, vacation, an minimal training/in-service time). Each patent receives (on average) less than 3 man-days total for your diligence in determining the patent background, current state of the art, etc.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
examiners repeatedly lied about the hours they were putting in and many were receiving bonuses for work they did not do
If workers in private industry do that, we call that fraud. Hours of claimed work should be validated and approved by an uninterested third party such as a supervisor.
The supervisor should keep their own private notes and reject the submission of hours, if it is in disagreement with their notes.
Patent examiners review applications and grant patents on inventions that are new and unique. They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees.
If thats true then anyone should be able to get a job there, seeing all of the idiotic patents they allow. Thus the funny parts were "masters" and "doctoral degrees"
Examiners are not experts in their field. You could be approving Apple's patents based on the mere fact that you own an iPhone. Examiners do not judge the technical merits of a patent, nor are they expected to.
Patent examiners are not experts in the sense that we think of experts--they are not, for example, in the top 100 people in the world working in a given space, nor do they even have lots of professional experience in the space.
They are also not laypeople. They need to have a technical degree, and the degree they have is generally but not always relevant to the patents the office has them review.
So while they are not experts and not supposed to be experts, they are also not the clerk from your supermarket--unless the clerk happens to have studied engineering.
They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees. They earn at the top of federal pay scale, with the highest taking home $148,000 a year.
I hadn't even considered applying for a patent office job before, but now they are definitely on my radar...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees
As a product of academia I am professionally trained to get things done on the cusp of deadlines. I'm not joking. Both on the student and instructor side there is simply a great deal of latitude. There's no time management enforced in any form except for "deadlines," so that's when you learn to get things done.
As lovely of a thought as it is that entering the workforce will automatically instill a newfound sense of responsiblity and dedication to all a graduates (and I'm sure it does for at least a few weeks or so), I for one am not surprised that working unsupervised at home at a government job with quarterly deadlines results in people observing the same habits they have for the past 6-10 years.
Admittedly, I wouldn't want to rush a result such that it is inadequately reviewed either, and I don't know if patent clerks have projects which would actually take an entire quarter to investigate, but the first thing I would do is have them sync all of their edits/notes/research in a way to make them reviewable. It's amazing how a little bit of transparency encourages people to make regular progress.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Oh, I'd imagine that private workers goof off too. The thing is, when they do it jeopardizes whatever project they're involved with, with monetary loss to the company.
In the case of the USPTO... well I'd imagine you've ready some of the stories of the horrific patents that keep getting passed (and how the USPTO claims they're sooooo overburdened). It's the whole country (and some would say other countries as well, see Apple V Samsung) that's suffering from *that* mess
If I've been goofing off at work for years, but do not work as a patent examiner, can I put down on my resume that I worked as a patent examiner if the work (or lack thereof) is virtually the same?
Ever seems to be missing the point. Sure, nearly everybody goofs off occasionally. Have I ever spent most of a work from home day goofing off? Sure. Have I ever dialed into a meeting and played video games because the meeting was totally useless for me? Yup. Ever encompasses many many things.
The thing is, the article isn't about how this one time a guy at the Patent office spent a day goofing off. Its about how goofing off, not doing the work, and then rushing the report is standard operating procedure.
You do get that there is a difference between something that someone did or something that happened and... how business is normally conducted. Like, its one thing to go out for lunch with your coworkers and all get drunk one day....its quite another to do it every day as a matter of course.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
But it is our business when public employees are being paid good money for bad work. I can understand how you believe differently. Wait. I can't. I can see no reason that your belief that the public has no interest in ho the people they are paying to do a job are performing that job.
The fact that you would state something so obviously wrong makes me think that either you have an agenda or are incredibly stupid.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Human nature being what it is.
"They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees. They earn at the top of federal pay scale, with the highest taking home $148,000 a year."
When I was a senior in college, the USPTO was at a career fair trying to snap up as many new grads as possible for patent examiner positions.
New grads are not experts in their fields. Period. No matter what degree they're walking away with.
That said, if I can make $148K working at home for USPTO, where the hell do I sign up?!?
I work at the PTO, and we do have pattern matching programs to help find prior art, they are mostly worthless because interpreting claims to match prior art is an abstract process. If you don't believe me read some patent claims and try to figure out what the 'broadest reasonable interpretation' of those claims would cover, its a nightmare. Applicants are certainly 'allowed to have communication' with us as the examination process involves a lot of back and forth with examiners trying to convince applicants to narrow their claims and applicants asking us to explain our interpretation of their claims and the prior art. As far as bribery goes I have never heard of or experienced any kind of bribery, what we typically experience is more of a brow beating from applicants who disagree with us.
Where does this deadline cycle NOT happen?
Managers and/or auditors could spend more time monitoring employees, but then you have to pay the monitors and hire more managers, and also monitor the monitors to make sure they are monitoring correctly, creating a recursive bloat in inspection time.
Further, the monitors and monitor of monitors would have to be experts to know if employees are really spending quality time. If you just count time staring at the screen, typing, or reading research, you can't know if it's relevant to the task unless you are an expert in that specialty also. Industry-specific auditors are going to be pretty expensive.
Plus, recruiting is harder and/or more expensive if potential specialty employees find out their ass is always under Big Brother's watch.
Brick-laying is relatively easy to monitor. Intellectual tasks, not so much.
Sometimes it's just cheaper to accept some slack than add bureaucracy layers to prevent all slack.
(It's similar to weeding out welfare cheats: Republicans want to heavily monitor welfare recipients, but the cost of monitoring and related lawsuits could be more than the welfare cheating, making taxes even higher, which Republicans can't stand...or at least act like they can't stand.)
Managers should be able to give bonus pay and/or penalties for productivity. However, in practice this often results in favoritism as managers judge based on friendship or kissing up rather than raw merit. Humans are just that way, in general.
In short, no easy fix.
Table-ized A.I.
Oh random government-worker hater modded up. Must be a Monday on slashdot.
It's insightful because no private sector workers ever goofed off, or spent the "work from home" days, grazing from the fridge, playing halo. And no public sector worker ever ever rushed through a piece of late work and did a half assed job.
Ever.
As phorm pointed out, when a worker in the private sector goofs off, that can have detrimental effects on a company's bottom line, and the company can take appropriate action. If a public sector worker goofs off, time is lost, but there is no bottom line for a government agency to be affected. Sure, they all have budgets, but there are not many negative consequences for having bad employees. They'll usually get a few more bucks in next year's budget regardless of performance. And the travesty here is that we're paying them to do a bad job. Public sector employees should take their jobs even more seriously than private sector employees because every tax-payer is ultimately affected by their performance.
I have no personal experience working for any government agency, but I did have a friend who got a job with the federal government after having worked in the private sector for many years. After about a month, his direct superior told him to take it easier because he was too efficient. If he stayed at the current level, many other workers would look bad in comparison, and the manager didn't want to have to explain that to his bosses. The manager absolutely could not get away with something like that at a competent profitable private company.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
The fact that you would state something so obviously wrong makes me think that either you have an agenda or are incredibly stupid.
You might like to try actually reading my post rather than just making up the contents and then replying to that unless that is you have an agenda (etc).
So what -specifically- did I state that was so obviously wrong?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
That's a cute view of companies. I have worked at several large corporation, an frankly they have little clue as to who is really productive.
I currently work cor a city government. There is so little waste here compared to any public government.
What I want to know is why government workers get bonuses.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I consulted for the USPTO several years ago, holding classes on memory and memory interfaces, USB, and Firewire It paid very well, but in the class of 50 examiners there wasn't even one who seemed to care or had any kind of interest in what I was saying. I was invited back but declined.
US Patent Office Grants Massively More Patents Than Ever Before (2011)
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
The world envies US Patent system (according to USPTO head):
http://beta.slashdot.org/story...
Im just waiting to see how many people hop onto the "Goofing off at work? HOW HORRIBLE" bandwagon during work hours.
Wait, crap.
A pattern matching job for how they are currently doing their work? this would be trivial.
One for how they are Supposed to be doing their work? that would be hard
Anyways, this is just telework people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Your post "Implies" that we have no business caring about public sector worker because "Private Sector Sucks!"
I stand corrected. But your post is still either written by an idiot or driven by an agenda.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
There aren't 8300 people working on each patent application. The USPTO received 609,052 patent applications last year. There are (roughly) 200 working days in a calendar year (accounting for sick leave, vacation, an minimal training/in-service time). Each patent receives (on average) less than 3 man-days total for your diligence in determining the patent background, current state of the art, etc.
609,052 / 8300 workers = 7 patents to review per worker per year.
If each patent takes 3 days to review, then that is 255 - 21 = 234 days left to do nothing.
Therefore, patent office working as expected!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
They earn at the top of federal pay scale, with the highest taking home $148,000 a year.
That's not even the salary of a manager at Google (and don't even talk about benefits -- free food is amazing) -- and this is the highest of salaries. For a lawyer (law school is will run you over $100K by itself). Can you imagine why they may not have the best and brightest? With the new patent office opening in San Jose, why would anyone actually want to work for the USPO who has any amount of talent?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
I've worked mostly at smaller companies and one very large one (50,000+ employees). I'll grant you that the oversight wasn't the greatest at the large company, but every department still had to produce something. I'm not saying all government workers are bad/lazy/whatever, just that there is less incentive to be productive, so "goofing off" is certainly more common in the public sector.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
The applicants "brow beat" patent examiners because of the numerous patent examiners who use completely inapplicable art to reject applications because the examiners don't take (or can't take) the time to provide sensible rejections.
Only $148k at the top of the scale? They probably get some benefits like health care, but they must be the dregs of Masters and Doctorates. I can't imagine taking such a pay cut, and I get 7 weeks paid vacation as well as a pension and health plan.
It sounds like they get a helluva lot more than 7 weeks paid vacation every year. That's the whole point of the article.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
Um how is 609,052/8300 = 7? My math shows 73.379759...., so 73.4ish.
Did you add an extra 0 and make it 83,000?
And therefore 73.4 * 3 = 220.2
So yeah.
We're seriously paying? For this?
I think I might be sick. I know the government is.
609,052 / 8300 workers = 73 patents to review per worker per year. If each patent takes 3 days to review then that is 260 - 219 = 41 days for sick time, vacation, and any patents that take longer than 3 days. Not much slack available there - especially if their math skills are as bad as yours.
The problem with these investigations is any organization where you have thousands of workers and you go looking for some workplace sin you will find "some" workers doing it.
The big problem is if you work for the government and the investigation causes a big enough stink then there will be some sort of action mandated by management that will make life painful for the employee, cost the taxpayer a lot of money, make the agency less productive, and fail to fix the problem.
Frankly, based on the public information available, we don't even know if there is a problem. Could just be the managers don't like people working from home.
> what we typically experience is more of a brow beating from applicants who disagree with us.
My understanding is that when a patent is rejected, the applicant can just resubmit, over and over until eventually the examiner cries uncle or they get a different examiner who decides to accept it.
It seems to me that, if that's true, then the job must be very demoralizing and as such I'm not surprised by this story. I would put the blame for this absenteeism on congress for not giving the patent office enough power to do their job effectively.
Ironically, I'd say this is a shining example of how small-government types are completely clueless as to how government works. If you indiscriminately "starve the beast" you just get even shittier results. You can't legislate good governance, but you can pass laws that encourage bad governance.
As a reviewer for USPTO, I can tell you... I just diarrhea though my queue, spending less than 10 seconds on a typical application... 2: Applications that are a refile of a previously rejected one.
No Examiner calls themselves a "reviewer"; it takes more than 10 seconds even to approve an application; and no Examiner would refer to continuations or RCEs as "refiles".
Suspicious post from anonymous poster that just happens to confirm every anti-patent bias is suspicious.
The patent office gets paid more for every patent they approve (even wrongly approved ones), than for every patent they reject.
Hence the culture.
Yes, we are paying these fishermen for the fish they *didn't* catch.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I get a whole lot less than 7 weeks unpaid vacation per year, except last year, that made up for a whole lot of prior years, but it was hell, and I might luck out this year. Paid vacations? Whoever heard of such a thing?
I love on $39,000 a year, and you can't imagine making less than $150,000?
What's wrong with this picture?
I love on $39,000 a year, and you can't imagine making less than $150,000?
What's wrong with this picture?
Why do people assume that something is wrong with a situation like this? Some people make more money than you do. Be happy for them and aspire to do the same (maybe, you know... find out how they did it), or just ignore them.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
I've seen big private organizations with a lot of slack also. Big, complex organizations are just difficult to manage, period. Look at all of Microsoft's and Sony's screw-ups, for example.
The one key difference though is that in the private sector one must meet sales expectations. If your teem doesn't produce sales, it's dismantled and people often fired. It's not always fair, but it is a constant pressure that puts a limit on goofing off.
The patent office doesn't really have the equivalent. Number of patents processed is not a very effective metric because one can slack on quality in exchange for quantity, and quality is difficult to measure because it requires a lot of specialists, who are hard to find and expensive. (Layers of auditors are not cheap, tax-wise.)
However, I do notice that the private sector "wastes" a lot of resources on manipulative marketing rather than making a better mousetrap: they've found it's often cheaper to trick the customer into buying an inferior mousetrap rather than just making a good trap. (The exception may be cars, which have a lot of consumer attention from both the public and consumer organizations.)
Thus, both public and private have plenty of BS and waste, it's just a different form of BS. The public sector generally does work harder, but often harder at manipulating buyers.
Table-ized A.I.
I have no personal experience working for any government agency, but I did have a friend who got a job with the federal government after having worked in the private sector for many years. After about a month, his direct superior told him to take it easier because he was too efficient. If he stayed at the current level, many other workers would look bad in comparison, and the manager didn't want to have to explain that to his bosses.
I had almost this exact situation occur when I went to work for Citicorp (briefly) many years ago.
I love on $39,000 a year, and you can't imagine making less than $150,000?
What's wrong with this picture?
You're spending too much on the ladies?
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Your post "Implies" that we have no business caring about public sector worker because "Private Sector Sucks!"
No it didn't. The GP claimes that "Public servants don't give an arm and a leg". And it was modded insightful.
It shows no insight: there are plenty of public sector workers who do care and there are plenty of private sector ones who don't. In other words, the jab at the ppublic sector workers as a whole (as opposed to this group) is unwarranted.
I stand corrected. But your post is still either written by an idiot or driven by an agenda.
And what, pray tell is that o master of determining hidden nonexistent agendas?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The three credit bureaus control enough as it is, thank you.
Can't, I just patented Artificial Sloth.
Table-ized A.I.
DMV?
IRS?
VA?
TSA?
FBI?
CIA?
NSA?
ATF?
Where are these awesome government workers that try and serve the public as well as possible?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
I don't think serviscope_minor implied that either, he just said its hardly news that either a private sector or public sector employees slack off, they both do. You can argue that we all pay taxes so we should care more however if you buy the product you may also pay higher prices for products. Of course people should care that this is happening, and it should be addressed, all serviscope_minor implied is that it wasn't a problem specific to the public sector. I think its more big vs small, or little buget vs big buget. e.g. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/a..., you can't tell me there wasn't a bit of waste there.
I actually think the reason that this is important is not private/public sector but due to the consequences of bad work. If a patent office employ grants a bad patient it effectively blocks the rest of the world from using that knowledge, without a costly, and long legal battle. That is a massive cost to the world. Where the Xbox one controller, so what it really only effects microsoft.
I think it was the "can't imagine" part of the picture he was asking about, actually. I find it odd too. You would expect that someone with such a poor imagination could very easily be replaced by a machine these days.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
No clue why this was marked "redundant". From what I can see, this is the point that everyone else is missing...it's not about a couple of guys occasionally goofing off, it's a culture of slacking off, then rushing and pushing through shoddy work, which has resulted in some fairly retarded patents getting approved, even in cases where prior art was clear.
Bits of code, random ramblings: jakimfett.com
If you've been following this issue, it isn't really about goof-off Federal employees protected by a union (sorry wing-nuts...)
A major part of it was that the US Patent and Trademark office expanded (probably to deal with earlier criticism about slow response or poor quality). But then the Federal judges - who were outside of the USPTO - weren't expanded (due to a hiring freeze from the Party of No, so work piled up while waiting for a judge.
It's easy to understand that the USPTO management might have been reluctant to lay people off in what may have seemed a temporary and artificial situation. It might even have been difficult to lay people off with year-long contracts (but I don't know how that works for the Feds.)
That still leaves plenty of criticism of the USPTO management. If it was inconvenient (rather than difficult) to lay people off, they should have started the process. They CERTAINLY should have kept better track of people's time - and even required certain minimal requirements (like availability, checkins, etc.)
It was management that got lazy or wanted to preserve their kingdom of employees. And the spark for this forest-fire of recriminations was The Party of No screwing up the country with the sequestration and other brain dead forms misguided budgeting.
I think it was the "can't imagine" part of the picture he was asking about, actually. I find it odd too. You would expect that someone with such a poor imagination could very easily be replaced by a machine these days.
What's so hard to believe about someone getting used to a certain paycheck? My income has varied greatly over the years, and each time I was making significant money, I "couldn't imagine" going back to less than significant money. It's human nature.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
I'll bet more taxes to pay for more workers, higher salaries and benefits would fix this problem in a jiffy! Every time I see anybody talk about needing higher taxes to run government properly, I just think about the ten thousand examples just like this, and I just laugh to myself.
Government has no competition. IBMs shitty employees just is not our problem. Public sector employees are our problem. The minute our lazy asses get up and demand accountability our lives as a whole will get better.
Too many lazy fucks in the public sector and too many lazy fucks in the public to stop it is something that the people can fix. If they can turn of "So you think you can dance" for a few minutes.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
You are off by one order of magnitude, it is 70 patents / worker / year.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
I work in Europe and we happen to apply patents, the most important of which are extended in the US, China and various countries according to our competition.
Earlier this year, I had an issue with extending one of my patents to China.
I got a formal letter in perfect english (not in Chinese mind you), raising an issue within the submitted text that indeed rendered it not really patentable.
With the approbation of our IP expert I proposed a redacted text, recognizing the issue and suggesting our new redaction would solve it.
Just two weeks after I got a second, more elaborate reply, still in an english better than mine, that commented my text more in detail and still pointed up a non-patentable point. We prepared a second comment. (at that point, in China like in most other places, if the patent is still rejected there is no more appeal)
One week later, our patent was accepted in China —with a wording much better than in any of the other countries we applied for, including the original language.
I don't wish to conclude on the Chinese potential, on Communist government handling of things vs ours, or whatever.
But some comparisons are telling...
Herve S.
This.
Unless of course you are Apple, IBM, Microsoft, or one of the other 'special' applicants who have their own rubber stamp (sorry I mean priority clearing house) for their patents.
Eventually we gave up applying for US patents because, especially as a foreign company, the prior art that gets presented is just an insult.
Really, we had them tag teaming two sets of prior art back forward, NEVER ONCE replying to our queries as to why it was applicable, just switching to the
other, and waiting until the end of their allowable response time to do this each time, until the window for acceptance just ran out.
Maximised their fees though, they were sure to do that..
So. What government workers are doing a great job?
To quote another user here: please eat your red herrings on your own time.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yup. I could not think of any either.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It's the thousands of over-paid, under-worked bureaucrats who are damned near impossible to fire when they're caught being lazy or violating the law.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. If you're paid out of the taxes I pay and you're caught not doing your job (or committing a crime), you should not only be fired, you should lose your precious pension.
Don't play fast and lose with the public's trust.
Can it be clustered? Think of the possibilities!
Privatize? Really?
This will never happen:
"Your patent has been rejected, we ( the patent review company ) already have a patent on that."
"PS: we will have our eye on you..."
emt 377 emt 4
Just FYI, the USPTO, along with the USPS, are fee funded, not tax payer funded, so it is actually companies and small businesses that are paying to have their applications prosecuted. So you aren't actually paying these government employees to do anything.
Sounds like "work from home" doesn't work at the USPTO. Even if it costs a bunch of money to get them into an office, it will be money more effectively spent than paying people to do fuck all.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
I agree IBM will charge whatever they can get away with, but they are competing with other companies with bad employees as well, wastefulness effects everyone no matter if it is private or public. High labour costs will be used to justify high prices if they can, we are not functioning in a market with perfect competition. Your under the false assumption that the only way for IBM to remove a efficient competitor is though price, it isn't they can file patents to remove competition, advertise, buy it out, change legislation, ....
Anyway the patent office is probably/should be funded by filing fees, should that excuse them, no.
It's called "Artificial Sloth Scaled". Makes a catchy acronym.
Table-ized A.I.
Sorry, gotta go anon with this. The Washington Post front-pager on this correctly identifies a major problem with how things work at PTO... part of this case is management getting whistle-blower complaints about some employees, and when info is sought on computer records and such, they got major pushback. The pushback I suspected (and was confirmed by the article) is the all-powerful patent examiner union. The examiner and grunt-worker unions hold a LOT of sway at the PTO.
The PTO as a matter of survival as an intelligent entity NEEDS telework to survive. You can't cram every technical expert you need into the DC area. It is crowded, expensive, and a major negative lifestyle factor getting to and from work every day. They need to allow for alternative working arrangements, including telework and its many satellite offices, to encourage technical experts to work for them. That's what everyone wants... it doesn't do anyone any good to deny paid contributions to the best people nationwide and cast the employment net only as far as someone who wants to take good money to move to the DC area. We want and need GOOD technical subject matter experts wherever they live.
I have known a lot of dedicated people working at PTO, and I'm guessing this issue is not as widespread as is being expressed. The unions need to give management better tools/latitude/"permission"/whatever to monitor work in a better way so they can fire/replace bad apples with better ones WITHOUT endless union lawsuits.
So, really, you're in no position to criticize...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
May be in the USA, but in many east Asian countries, especially Japan, government workers get paid little but work their ass off.
New Economic Perspectives
You seem to be implying that when a company suffers harm, the rest of the country is unaffected.
Not only is that not how it works, some of those private companies are also the ones whose lobbying brought the USPTO to its current state.
Oh, I'd imagine that private workers goof off too. The thing is, when they do it jeopardizes whatever project they're involved with, with monetary loss to the company.
You've never worked before have you.
Some people have turned slacking off into a full time job. As long as the company is making money, they dont get noticed. The worst slackers I've worked with were in the private sector (and not unionised, union people know they have a job to do). They're normally in middle management/admin positions that dont get monitored for performance. Think about all the people who call pointless meetings, extend meetings with pointless conversation/questions and when you come to them needing something, they've got a huge tale of woe explaining how they're too busy to help (yet can take a 2 hour lunch).
As long as the P&L statement looks good, these people never get noticed... If the P&L statement starts to look bad, they're normally not the first ones fired either.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
For all of the jokes about the DMV, every time I've been there the workers know their jobs and move things along just fine. Its the folks who couldn't be bothered to make an appointment, didn't bring the right paperwork, or hate the law and are (very loudly) requesting that it not be applied to them who end up spending lots of wasted time at the DMV.
Well, seems to me, if managers know whats going on, then they are goofing off as well. Not doing what they are paied to do.
Well - we know in the EPA some employees are smearing shit on the walls for kicks. So couple this with the USPTO and you can pretty much assure that almost every public agency you've listed is goofing off pretty often. It's a wonder anything ever gets done. And ObDisclaimer: I'm kind of sort of on a contract that one of the players is the VA.
We sent them something for evaluation three weeks ago and they haven't looked at it yet.
And about a decade ago I worked with the CJIS folks in Clarksburg. Not the brightest bulbs or sharpes crayons let me tell you.
If you think for a moment that Experian, Equifax and Transunion are running pristine databases you're sorely mistaken. They're pretty much the master of all fuck ups. It's just that their PR machines leads us to believe otherwise.
No exactly the same. But they do enough damage that it might as well be the same.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
However you look at it reducing the power of the government over the people ends up with the people winning.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
DMV workers are shit. That is why people pay a premium to AAA and Private DMVs to stay away for the government tards.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
So all those bailouts to an inefficient post office - that can't do the job DHL, USPS, and Fed-X do... And all those raises in postage... where did that money go and come from again?
Me thinks you're living in a fantasy world when it comes to how things are funded at the government level. Government "agencies". a.k.a. "Tenured Jobs Programs" primary mission is continuing their existence, and increasing their funding. It's why we have "mandatory budget increases" written into LAW for absolutely everything, and why Congress won't pass a budget - they want to keep the mandatory increases written into law before the recession hit. One buys the most federal worker votes this way...
Murphy was an optimist
Yeah, it's not like some private company whose workers goofed off would produce a car that got drivers killed or anything. And it's not like private corporate pressure to be profitable would ever cause sloppy work.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Was there some indicating that "goofing off" produced defects which caused fatalities? I'd agree with the later (Corporate pressure towards profit) but I don't think that's related to the issue at hand.
Remember that it is far easier to hide things in private-sector businesses. Private-sector orgs claim that to have to disclose what the public-sector has to would put them at risk, yet much malfeasence and incompetence can be hidden. I think we have just seen this in auto makers hiding recalls. So, the bottom line doesn't always properly record inefficiency and stupidity, especially when accounting can be used to hide losses. It is creative destruction, technology that undermines entrenched organization that leads to change. People tend to be inertial. That have to be kicked by breakthroughs that make their way of doing things change suddenly. This is true of all operations, private business is not as different from public-sector work as you might think.
In fact, much of the government's inefficiency is due to the penny-wise and pound-foolish spending policies of Congress, which tends to be uncreatively conservative about spending that would really create efficiency. Go to any government office and look at their IT. It is like going back in time 20 or more years in time. That is due to an obstructive procurement process as set up by Congress. What you have to remember about Congress is that most of its members are incompetent, especially about technology, and yet technology is a huge part of the spending they approve. So, if you have ever worked for a government agency, you know that the conditions and the work techniques often revolve abound antiquated technology and the attendant organization problems it creates, not individual laziness. Working in such an environment, created by back-firing checks and balances written into the Constitution, is disheartening if you want to do a better job that gets more efficient and easier. The inertia in the system impedes your progress.
In the private sector one sees much better technology, generally, but there the problem is short-term thinking and failure often comes from half-baked executive decisions that ruin good ideas.
And what's the difference between a corporation or the USPTO doing the same thing? After all, all the people in the government got there through corporate funding, so they are corporate pawns subject to constant corporate lobbying, so saying the USPTO employee is not influenced by corporate interests is boloni. In a - there is a shitload of money to be made (or lost through a lawsuit) through the USPTO, so you better have your people in there - kinda way. Which is why I say fuck patents. The only patent allowed should be a defensive one, that enters straight into public domain on publishing, no 20 year hogging interval. That way nobody can later come sue you over what you practice, that they invented it, 2 seconds before you did, so pay up to them. In fact that does not work either, because that patent is vulnerable the same way. What you need is open publishing of ideas, in a covert sort of way spread all over the place, and leaving them public domain without taking out a patent on them, to cover your ass. However the barriers to publishing are huge, and the price of reading officially published material is huge. Of course this only applies to scientific and technical things, art is a whole different cake. There is only one science that applies to the world, and once you obtain a scientific or technological truth and are hogging it from everybody else, you're committing a crime. Such as the Haber-Bosch process, or saltpeter-sulfur-charcoal gunpowder, or paper printing, or porcelain, or ultramarine, or even such things as the number zero, meaning a positional numbering system invented independently by the Mayans and Hindus, but unknown to the Romans and Greeks- these things can be invented independently around the world - those are one and only, and nobody should have the right to hog science or claim intellectual property in it, and scientific publications should not have such a high price, compared to arbitrary price charged for irrelevant novels, that you can live without for instance. To put it in context, you cannot live without gunpowder in 1600, or very difficultly so, but you can live fine without reading Dante Allighieri's Divine Comedy, which, btw, I haven't read to this day, and I'm doing fine without it, it's not an essential part of life, unlike access to science and technology. And I live just fine without Mickey Mouse, but because of him I have to sit here and twirl my thumbs waiting for most scientific publications after 1923 to enter public domain, until 2020, and I could be at 1937 by now. By the way the military published a lot of NBS(national bureau of standards) gov't documents which are supposed to be public domain, with complex issues around that, but hands down publications from 1937-1950 fly far and above in quality to the ones published starting 1950-1960 and on, and you can still find some gems here and there, but the percentage drops to like 5% gems 95% crap in 1960 compared to 95% gems and 5% crap in 1937.
I said privatize, create competition to where one agency doesn't have a huge backlog, but know how to reject bullshit patents, and above the 3 top agencies you could have other ones doing similar tasks, but who you obtained your patent from could make a difference, as in where did you get your college education, a run of the mill patent or diploma place, or one that demands quality, and knows how to reject candidates. There could be FBI oversight just like there is with police departments - who are, by the way the master of fuck ups in one sense, not in another, it's a funny world - but you could have competition, and free market competition instead of centralized government is what we believe in in the US, distributed networking like the Internet instead of a central mainframe server that is a critical point and can take everything down with it. Competition in the government between at least 2 parties, such as Democrat and Republican, is better than the one party Nazi or Communist systems of not so long ago, and you're silly to think it's better and these politicians pretending to be competing against each other, and putting up a puppet show for the rest of us, are not really controlled by the same single entity at their balls, called the Almighty US Dollar, or whoever is hogging that entity the best. But even in court we have this make believe antithesis between a conspiring plaintiff-defense legal professionals against you, and some courts do demand you bring along a legal professional, or get yourself certified in passing the bar exam, but it's still better than some arbitrary judge, like it used to be in the old days, even if it turns out to be a puppet show. By the way one of the greatest achievements of Christianity during the collapse of the Roman empire was the providing of religious clergy, like bishops, who truly believed in God, and in absolute truth, and could serve as impartial judges at trials without a prosecutor-defense attorney puppet show. In fact even today we have shows like Judge Judy and the like, where there is an arbitrary despot coming up with decisions, but the US Consitution does not believe in such concentration of power, and gives everyone the right to trial by jury, made up of 12 people, as in distributed power, in internet, or democrat/republican, or prosecutor-attorney, competition in arguments and point of views is better than an arbitrary centralized despot, like the USPTO.
As an examiner it was the managers who were screwing over the examiners. The would wait till the last minute to review applications and then force examiners to scramble at the end of the quarter to catch up on work that managers weren't approving. Hell, after I left my manager took credit for my work that he wouldn't approve. That honest work would have netted me 2 promotions and a nice bonus. Using software to monitor examiner work is pure bullshit.
I think painting broad strokes over all DMV offices is overgeneralizing. (The thing we all have in common is that no one is excited about going to the DMV.)
I lived in one state where I "didn't bring the right paperwork" despite calling specifically about the paperwork to ask whether the documentation I had was sufficient. I was told over the phone that it would be, but when I got there and waited in the giant line, they told me that it wasn't.
Fast forward to a different state: I showed up, got squared away, and left in under 30 minutes.