I'm sure the intentions were good, but the presentation was terrible. Also, it was only one of many factors, but its a catchy line so I chose to call that one out.
Other include:
* Far worse benefits package and no attempt/willingness to make us whole in that regard
* About half the team was told they would no longer be eligible for raises because their salaries were above the top of their IBM pay band
* Several people lost large amounts of 401k matching because they missed their partial vesting date for that year (some by a few weeks) because the transition was done as being fired and then hired again
* Likewise we were not eligible to start contributing to the IBM 401k for some amount of time
* The IP agreement was Draconian (and we aren't in a state with nice moonlighting laws)
* They took away our office's coffee budget, which seems small and petty but it was a damned nice thing to have
* Two of the worst performers were promoted to be engineering managers because they didn't know what else to do with them....
CEOs of these large companies really need to step up and take control of these groups who develop an unreasonable amount of risk aversion due to a long history of dealing with issues that have a great deal of gravity for them even though they're fairly minor for the organization overall.
There are some companies that get this right, but a general shift hasn't happened yet and there's probably quite a few CEOs that can't justify the political expense and fallout without the backing of a major culture shift in businesses at large. It might be years or even decades before that happens and it's going to be sad to see small agile companies fall to it in the meantime.
As to the actual purpose, I think it's a similar deal to feudalism. Whatever waffle kings and nobles said, looking back it was pretty clearly about self-aggrandizement, filling one's pockets, taking revenge upon one's enemies, et cetera, ad nauseam.
I guess this shouldn't be surprising; primates gonna prime.
This caused the most of the problems during our acquisition. I'm still with IBM but we had a few people leave over the "IBM owns everything you ever do" clause.
> They took away our office's coffee budget, which seems small and petty but it was a damned nice thing to have
We had company lunch each Friday that had to end with IBM. It's a small thing but it really changes the culture and moral.
None of these exist in the US (particularly when you work for someone like IBM). Employees who think otherwise are simply misunderstanding the law :)
"Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer’s equipment, supplies, facilities, or trade secret information..."
Good luck trying to prove that against IBM's lawyers and patent portfolio.
This might be an example: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/26551.wss
You forgot the super-important part, which are literally the words after what you quoted, which say: " except for those inventions that either: (1) Relate at the time of conception or reduction to practice of the invention to the employer’s business, or actual or demonstrably anticipated research or development of the employer; or (2) Result from any work performed by the employee for the employer."
#1 covers pretty much everything tech related that tech related people do. For example, if you work for IBM, i doubt you can find anything not related to IBM's business, or the R&D of IBM. Becuase it's not what you think IBM's business is, it's what IBM think it's business is. It also doesn't matter whether it's a secret project you don't know about, or historical, or anything.
It makes no difference what you do for the company either. If I work as an IP lawyer for Google, and Google builds self-driving cars (among other things), any work i do on my own time related to self driving cars is Google's.
Note also "related to", not "exactly the same as". So if it's in the same area, field, etc, you are screwed.
But you don't have to take my word for it, look at court cases in CA, which find the same :)
Now, maybe if you work for a small, super-focused company, you may be okay.
But good luck if you work for any mid or large sized tech company, which often have so many projects, strategic initiatives, and research that it covers pretty much everything in the world.
To wit: In every case an employee has come to me saying "well, we don't do that, so why would you own it", it has been a case that the employee did not know there was a team doing it. I have never had a case of an employee coming to me and it turned out "yeah, you know what, we don't really do anything in that area"
IBM most likely spent (speculating here) several millions of dollars on the acquisition, and they can't afford to pay the devs? This is completely messed up.
Also - Hi Greg!
The most popular IBM software we used was SameTime for instance messaging and it was actually not bad at all.
Lotus Notes is actually quite good when used properly and in moderation, but it really does not set a positive tone culturally.
You could write a decent Lotus Domino app that served up web pages, so users wouldn't have to use the awful Lotus Notes client.
Amusingly, in I think Lotus Notes 8, they revitalised the GUI by replacing it with... Eclipse RCP. Hrmm.
I did witness some monstrosities, though...
painful flashback! or, I guess, "trigger" in the parlance of today.
I worked for a biotech software company some years ago that wasn't even bought by IBM but as part of becoming an "IBM Business Partner" agreed to use Lotus Notes to replace a bunch of existing stuff we were using for email/collaboration/etc.
Notes isn't even bad or anything but it was no better than the tools we were already using for the tasks we were using them for, and because it is (or was? haven't used it since) a big all-encompassing "enterprise" system it took like a half-year migration period to get everyone to the point where we could do the same sorts of things we could before, not really any better or worse, just different and incredibly disruptive during the transition.
(also, is this mkozlows from qt3? haven't posted there in a long time, used to use the handle Coca Cola Zero).