Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview
patentpandas.org
patentpandas.org
They asked if we ever thought about selling our technology to them before the meeting and at the meeting they baited us for how our tech worked saying we'd like to work with you tell us how it works. Once we did they left the room (Dugan's 2nd right hand man at the time and another) & 3 minutes later showed us the door saying the "race is on."
They have since been awarded patents for audio syncing across phones.
Many here will say that's just how Silicon Valley works.... takes advantage and stomps on the little guy innovators & their dreams. That's not professional and I met with many other companies like Samsung who acted with the utmost respect & professionalism towards us. Yet, Google whose motto is "Don't Be Evil," can't act in the same fashion?
We started SpeakerBlast in March 2013 & were meeting with Google in April 2013. We filed a provisional before the meeting & have a patent in the patent office.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9itwp_wYc&index=20&list=UU...
We revived it after seeing Google's April 2018 patent & are excited about finally getting it out to the public.
may be that's why they change it with doing right things (for own purpose) - https://bgr.com/2015/10/04/google-dont-be-evil-alphabet/
The problem isn't that those claims were lies. I'm sure Google's founders actually intended Google to "not be evil." The problem is that a corporation (or a government, university, church, fraternal organization, you name it) is made up of people. As such things get big they end up being made up of many, many people. Leaders change. Managers change.
When an org gets big some of its people will be assholes because some people are assholes.
Google has been through several CEOs and is a publicly traded company with the latter meaning that it's subject to market pressure and activist investors. It's also a company large enough and relevant enough to be a "national security" interest, making it likely subject to government and intelligence infiltration, pressure, and micromanagement.
Also I didn't know Google had patents for syncing audio across phones. I wonder if any of the mobile apps (like AmpMe [1]) have to pay some license fees.
I once spent an evening researching the different apps that could sync audio across multiple devices [2]. I also wanted to build my own app, so tried to see if it would be possible (only if you have a jailbroken phone.) I just wanted to play the same audio on two pairs of AirPods. I found out that the Samsung Galaxy S9 has a Dual Audio feature, and the iPhone X can theoretically support this with Bluetooth 5.0. And the AmpMe app can sync audio across multiple phones. (I was also really surprised to find out that they're a pretty huge company with 20 full time employees.)
[2] https://www.evernote.com/l/ACo7ItT-pItKkZoYf0YJy0raGhN5255FR...
The owner is a sketchy guy that made his money using adware (and still is) named Wajam.
I guess AmpMe is what he hope will be his legit way to make money. Until it happens, it's probably bleeding money and is founded by his adware company.
I guess you can get fancy if the devices have microphones but I still think it wouldn't be difficult. Like one man-year worth of work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ9itwp_wYc&index=20&list=UU...
1 - Erlich's term, not mine.
Also for repeatedly posting flamebait and ignoring our requests to stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17807056
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17767666
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17486112
But the main issue is using HN primarily for ideological or political battle. That's directly against the spirit of this site, and destroys it more insidiously than incivility does.
Positive vote scores, alas, aren't an indicator of whether comments are good for HN or not. The most indignant and ideological comments routinely get upvoted. That's one reason they're insidious.
Thanks.
Flamebait is a matter of effect, not intent, just like tossing lit matches in dry forests. It's our job to prevent flamewarring users from burning this site down, thereby ruining it for the majority who want to use it as intended. The site guidelines distill long experience about what kinds of comments do and don't have that effect.
I mean... I could easily take that lollipop from that naïve baby in that baby carriage... but I don't, simply because I'm Not A Dick™.
Did all of Silicon Valley get the wrong takeaway from the Apple/Xerox thing, or something?
Let's use a different real-world example. An acquaintance shows me an "attic treasure" that I know is worth at least $20k on the open market. Do I offer them $100 and not tell them what it might really be worth? Does it depend on how well I know them?
In my case, even if I did not know the person at all and never expected to interact with them again (basically, the recipe for non-cooperation, according to Axelrod's https://smile.amazon.com/Evolution-Cooperation-Revised-Rober...), I'd offer them about $5k (given some reselling risk and effort on my part, which I believe is worth at least some of the difference). If they were smart then they'd refuse and do their own homework. If they simply wanted to accept the price, they could.
I would NOT offer to take it off their hands for free. "More space in your attic!"
I'm sure that Google didn't owe this woman anything and didn't know her from a hole in the wall but... This is just machiavellian ruthlessness.
Don't be greedy, people. Make mutually-beneficial deals. It's not zero-sum (even though the particulars on how it's possible to not be zero-sum still escape me and hurt my head).
The earth isn't a closed thermodynamic system ;)
If I have a hamburger patty and a hot dog bun, and you have a hot dog bun and a hamburger patty, we both win if we trade (it's not zero-sum).
You can generalize this across more than one party and more than two goods pretty easily.
Aesthetic value is still value. Most people would prefer not to eat Nutraloaf three meals a day.
Assume that you have something that has a complementary relationship with something I have, but doesn't have a complementary relationship with anything you have. Assume that I'm in the same situation in relation to you. If we trade objects, we both benefit. Hot dog buns and hamburger buns are designed to be complements of certain respective forms of ground meats, hence the naming scheme.
OP knew that she had something valuable. But she also thought of it as a free good (libre, not gratis). As I interpret it this is because she knew that her work builds on the work of others.
At Google, they probably knew about the intellectual background of OP's innovation, too. And yet, they tried to patent it. So much about their intellectual honesty.
I've ruminated on this.
I think the only reason that could explain such excess is competitiveness. To them, it is like a game. Its not about getting another yacht, its about beating the other guy. I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
I had to google that. Shocking story.
> To them, it is like a game.
I think you're right. I also think Trump (ahem) once said something along these lines: "At some point, all this stops being money and is just numbers that you want to keep going up." That would support your competitiveness assertion. (It might also explain why men tend to make more than women, but I digress.)
> I think its the same mechanism that will drive someone to grind for many hours in an MMO or suchlike.
nah, that's just the variable-ratio reinforcement schedule :) https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-variable-ratio-schedu...
I think their sense of identity is tied to their performance. I noticed the same thing in sports or even in school were students compare exam scores.
This is presumably what might inspire a billionaire to sue Forbes over their position in Forbes published rich list - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-saudi-billionaire...
Money is entirely ego-points for people like that.
Not saying private companies can't engage in heinous shenanigans either, they sure can.
It is very simple, they only care about themselves. Everything else is irrelevant.
”For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” I Timothy 6:10
A major meta problem in the current system is that even when bad behavior is able to be formally judged and is called out, there is still little downside for getting caught. Under a functioning legal system, Google would have to make OP whole for their time/stress/legalfees/etc incurred, and would therefore be discouraged from attacking again. Alas.
The individuals have no problem sleeping at night because there is no shortage of narratives to pick from to justify their actions - then further normalized by their peer group engaging in similar business. Nobody sees themselves as a bad person.
In the absence of a working justice system, are we helpless? Mostly, yes. But Google's reputation will take a big hit here, rightly so. Ideally, the individuals involved at Google would also take a big reputation hit. In an ideal world when they apply for a job, these individuals will be rejected for their immoral, unethical behavior.
Ideally yes, in reality? the problem of a system that rewards trickery and deceit is that eventually the opposite (truth, honor, respect, etc) becomes worthless. You even have countries like mine that are so down this rabbit hole that being called a "good guy" is almost an insult because it just means you're simpleton who gets scammed.
Public reputation is only good in an environment where (public)reputation matters and in this situation the (private)reputation of that google employee within the corporation as a guy who makes money for the company matters more than if a limited portion of the public (us here) knows he outright steals things from other people through deceit. In general the average consumer couldn't care less about the actual individuals behind the products they are using or the controversies behind their creation. The vast, vast majority of computer users don't know that Xerox actually created the GUI and not Apple or Microsoft, and they don't care. So expecting them to provide justice in lieu of the system its a tall order to say the least.
it's actually not a bad thing that it's one of the few places you can actually be an asshole without feeling bad for it though
And, sorry, but it's hard to escape the indicative aspect of liking the oportunity to be "an asshole without feeling bad about it"...
https://zurb.com/blog/steve-jobs-and-xerox-the-truth-about-i...
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
What's not immediately publicly evident is the opportunity cost vis a vis attrition and new hires - how many people have left from disillusionment? How many prospective employees are actively shunning Google directly because of these policies? (While a number might provide explicit feedback to recruiters about their reasons to reject, it's probable a silent majority is silently avoiding all contacts from Google recruiting.) At least personally speaking, I had a vastly more positive view of google around 2012 when I started grad school (more or less my dream company to work for at the time) than what I had when graduating (sufficient to decline any recruiting requests).
Ah, found the episode: Season 2 Episode 2, "Runaway Devaluation".
What google did here is one of the evilest things you can do.
They are taking open research and trying to close it off. Research that they didn't even contribute to! Research that they didn't need patent rights for because it's already free for them to use. But they can't allow anyone after them to have the same privilege can they?
Not only are these systems broken in their implementation, but there is little evidence that even in their most pure form they accomplished their supposed intention.
So... How is this not literally a crime?
https://www.patentdocs.org/2018/10/supreme-court-denies-cert...
That case appears to be civil, not criminal?
Here are some articles about that: https://www.inquisitr.com/4935898/google-accused-of-trying-t... https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/after-patent-office-re...
And a HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14751977
I guess the "don't be evil" thing is already well down the toilet.
What's that all about? A new form of tribute when you're called upon to kiss Google's ring?
1) that's false
2) that doesn't make it less evil, let alone acceptable
I guess they agreed on my behalf?
Curious if you remember the wording/page number on the visitor agreement? It'll help people to be on the lookout when they visit Google.
* No taking photographs or video without permission.
* Don't disclose things you see in the office outside the office
It's literally 3 sentences, and they have handy little icons next to each.
I see nothing about IP rights assignment or anything of the sort.
The lesson: Always RTFA before signing it (where the A stands for the agreement), because sadly there's no such thing as an accepted, named standard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_University_v._Roche_M...
Citation for the first assertion? Here's an excerpt from the Supreme Court's summary of the facts: One Dr. Mark Holodniy [0], who had recently joined a Stanford lab as a fellow, "signed a Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement (VCA). That agreement stated that Holodniy "will assign and do[es] hereby assign" to Cetus [predecessor to Roche] his "right, title and interest in each of the ideas, inventions and improvements" made "as a consequence of [his] access" to Cetus." [1] The trial court's opinion [2] states that Holodniy signed the VCA "[a]t the time he began working at Cetus"; it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if he did so without first getting the VCA reviewed by the Stanford legal department, because after all it's just an NDA, right?
Yes, the Stanford fellow worked at Cetus for nine months learning various techniques — which were published — and, months later, used (at least some of) the techniques when working with his Stanford colleagues.
The point is that a relatively-junior Stanford employee — as a result of having signed another organization's "Visitor Confidentiality Agreement" — in effect gave the other organization a get-out-of-jail-free card: The other organization was allowed to infringe Stanford's patent on a later invention by other Stanford investigators because the junior employee's own contribution to that invention qualified as a "consequence" of the employee's previous training at the other organization.
> Your comment is incredibly misleading.
You're entitled to your opinion, of course. The lesson is still valid: RTFA before you sign it — because otherwise you might be giving away valuable rights months or years down the road.
[0] https://profiles.stanford.edu/mark-holodniy
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=145195436028699....
[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=776650368736548...
You're making it sound like he just popped in one day and had a sandwich and a chat with the people working there. Your own citation, though, is to "the time he began working at Cetus". The "visitor" NDA there is more like "visit" in the sense of "visiting professor" -- someone who will be there for an extended time, working alongside the other people there.
And your original link to Wikipedia's summary says:
The Stanford lab in which Holodniy worked had been working on developing better HIV tests, and wanted to try the new PCR method, so Holodniy's supervisor had arranged for him to work at Cetus to learn the technique ... [a]fter completing his training at Cetus, Holodniy then returned to Stanford where he and other Stanford employees tested the HIV measurement technique.
If you work somewhere for a while and they give you training in the stuff they do, they're going to want you to keep that confidential and probably want to make claims on anything you develop as a result of what they taught you. You are heavily misrepresenting the word "visitor" to make it sound like he was only there for an office tour or something.
- You're arguing that it was meet and right for Cetus to claim ownership of anything that the Stanford fellow did, presumably ad infinitum, as long as it was a "consequence" of the training that Cetus provided to the Stanford fellow. While I think that's a pretty aggressive position, I really don't care, because it's a business decision for each party to make.
- In contrast, I am suggesting that the Stanford fellow probably didn't realize the consequences of his signing a so-called confidentiality agreement, and that the lesson is to RTFA, not to assume that the agreement is limited by what its title says.
No, I'm claiming that it should not have been surprising that the agreement for someone who worked there included such claims. How I personally feel about it is irrelevant; it's a standard practice, and to be expected.
What I am arguing with is your repeated use of terms like "visitor", to make it sound like the guy just popped in for lunch one day and they claimed all his work. He worked there. They trained and taught him. While there are contexts in which "visitor" can be the appropriate term for that (again, see "visiting professor"), the usual connotation of "visitor" is incredibly misleading here, and I wish you'd be more clear about it.
"Visitor's Confidentiality Agreement" was the title of the NDA, for Pete's sake; that's what makes it sound as though the guy popped in for a meeting.
And the trial court's opinion says that the Stanford fellow "commut[ed] daily" to Cetus. This seems to suggest strongly that the fellow divided his time between Stanford and Cetus — in effect, that the guy was a daily visitor to Cetus, as opposed to being seconded to Cetus.
Again, the point: RTFA — because hindsight opinions might differ about what you should or shouldn't have expected.
And you brought this up in a thread about something not even close to the same situation, yet presented it as relevant. And doubled down despite being contradicted by your own sources. He worked there. He knew he worked there. He was not just popping in for half an hour that one time to have lunch with them. He worked there and they trained him on their techniques while he worked there. The fact that the word "visitor" was in there is not relevant and does not make it be the same situation that this thread was about. It is not the same situation. It is not a similar situation. It is not the same situation because -- have I mentioned this? -- he worked there.
If the patent system somehow made it so people like the author of this post would actually make lots of money, that would be different. But it doesn't work that way.
There was an application that I worked on. I figured out all of the hard technical problems as the lead developer. Then when the guy got funding he kicked me off of the project, hired his friends, and filed a patent. He was "nice enough" to put my name on it but not as an assignee. Meaning I could never own any of the hard work I did.
This is the type of thing that reminds me that the idea that we really even have a civilization is a myth. Everything is just a game where the people who start with the biggest advantages and stoop low enough for the best scams come out on top.
>> Why would she do something like $badthing?
Am I the only one wondering why anyone would think a person's resume should be any kind of predictor of good or bad behaviour?
In fact, one way to get an impressive resume is to railroad others and use people as stepping stones to your way to the top.
https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/10/19/edison-publicly-torture...
https://www.wired.com/2008/01/dayintech-0104/
"The war of the currents (sometimes called battle of the currents) was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents
Electrocuting an Elephant seems to have occurred a decade after the war of currents January 17, 1903.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)#Association_w...
Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children.
Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter.
People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.
A properly functioning complex system should be able to tolerate a few bad apples, limiting the harm that they can cause. If you work in such a system and there are bad apples, you can justify the ethics of your work if there are checks and balances that limit the leader's ability to harm.
The obvious analogy is the current U.S. political system. It's quite possible to see the United States as generally striving for a more fair society, and generally good, and yet to be disgusted by Trump's cruelty and inept. The only way to square those two competing ideas is to acknowledge that even though Trump is a miserable rotten apple, he doesn't really have all the power. As bad as he is, he won't last forever, and the principals of the U.S. will long survive him.
My point is that there are plenty of folks at the top of their company that are not physcopaths, they inched their way up over decades of sweat and tears, and even if they aspired to lead on their way up, they knew they had to prove themselves in every aspect of the business first. CEOs of GM and Merck are decent examples. Then there are folks who believe they were chosen for the job before their birth. I'm scared of them.
At least, that's what I hope.
Politics on the other hand works almost always, the person just needs to be apprehensive and adapt to whom they try to please. Its not limited to corporations, plain old state politics and bureaucracy is the same.
Btw minor nitpick - I would expect much more sociopaths than proper psychopaths in top of the pyramid.
> Why would she do something like this?
Because the latter may be the reason for the former
When I see a resume that cites multiple company foundings, dozens of patents, dozens of projects, etc. I know the person is either stealing or taking credit for others work or just padding their resume in the more conventional sense. It says this person is a liar, exaggerator, narcissist, or sociopath.
It's simply not physically possible for a human being to do the amount of stuff I see on some resumes/CVs. There are not enough hours in a day to actually invent (as in actually conceptualize, research, and prove) a hundred things in 20 years or found (as in actually shepherd to success) dozens of companies. Founding one successful company takes several years and a ridiculous amount of work. Founding two or three in a life time is possible but off the charts impressive and the number of people who can realistically claim this are few. Dozens? Physically impossible, but I've seen such things claimed... by people whom I later saw were total liars and sociopaths.
Edit: it's different if they accurately claim to have managed people who have done these things, like "managed a research organization with over 200 patents and 1000 publications" or "founded company X and also contributed as an advisor to companies Y and Z" etc. It's also important to note authorship positions in long lists of publications since some science teams add everyone who ever touched a project as an author. Being listed on a bunch of publications with 15 authors is not a contrarian indicator, but claiming to be a primary researcher on absurd numbers of things can be.
At promotion time, people will ask 'if you've been researching $thing for 3 months, why haven't you patented anything yet?'.
Does she? Or does she just have an impressive patent portfolio cribbed from others' work?
Or, in fairness, did this not happen as told because there's another side to the story?
In my experience outside of Google, typically how this works is that you will get a visit from product counsel asking if you have any patent-able work. It's not your job to ask if it's novel enough; that's the patent lawyers job.
So they bug you for months while you are trying to get work done asking about what you are working on and how it works, and then file something on your behalf. I can't recall if I even needed to sign anything before a provisional application was filed.
The way that this is pitched is that it's a necessary evil. One needs a huge patent portfolio to protect your tech inventions, because when you are sued, you can leverage your portfolio to protect yourself. I hate this system and how it works, but it is a business reality.
I don't know Regina, but I think Hanlon's razor applies. It less likely that she woke up one day and said, "well, I want to steal other people's inventions today!", than, "oh I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back."
It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.
I'll probably burn some Hacker News points here but the old adage needs to be updated. Never attribute to stupidity or malice what can be attributed to both stupidity and malice.
Company motto: “Don’t be evil”
Do you notice the hypocrisy here?
Aside from that, I'm not saying that there's not hypocrisy but I am saying that the real story is often more nuanced than first appearances.
You would have had a hell of a lot more work to do if you'd actually come up with the ideas you patented yourself, instead of stealing somebody else's bunch of work they did.
Having been in a similar situation before, the correct answer is “I’ll get my lawyer to contact you with our NDA process” or if you’re really worried “fuck off”.
It’s probably better to file patent first though. The patent is what you need to sell them.
One fun fact I stumbled across is any misconduct when filing for a patent voids the entire patent application, not just the claims that the misconduct occurred in: https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2016.html
As for the rest of your argument, there’s a big gap between the people who love to share ideas and tech and the people who want to monetize every drop of IP. I think it would take a pretty twisted or cynical mind to even think of patenting something like an electronics-integrated storybook. This is not a remotely new idea (story/picture books with embedded electronics have been around for decades), and there’s no fundamental innovation at the root of these patents. This is just the worst impulses of VC culture out of control.
I had 2 patents issued when I was at Google. As best as I can recall, the bonus for first one was nice ($5K?), and then the second was much smaller ($1K). I'm not sure how far the reward decays (I do not recall if it reaches zero). I remember thinking at the time that the Google patent bonuses were much smaller than patent bonuses at other companies, as a friend at Red Hat was making a killing via patent bonuses.
However, I'm sure the patent lawyers made a lot
My understanding (again IANAL) is that even if you sign documents with your company agreeing that they own all your innovation while employed, you are still legally the assignee for your patents. If you run off and patent something while employed and don't sign over a patent they want, you will be in breach of whatever contract/document you signed, but until any conflict is resolved it's not their patent until you assign it to them.
Accepting the "patent bonus" is a way of having you confirm the transfer of your IP to them. It legally finalizes the deal you made when you hired in and signed that bullshit IP document. From their side it's a tiny price to pay for that.
I'm sure a real lawyer can iron out the details I didn't get right in the above.
How the organisations react to that bad apples is what matters. I have seen companies ruined by half a dozen people that bully others, play office politics and blame games. Most of the people were fantastic, but the CEO will do nothing about this bullies in high positions.
If a company has no way of dealing with these people, the company does not deserve to survive. So, yes there are bad apples. But, the companies have the tools to make them correct their behaviour or get rid of them.
> It’s probably better to file patent first though.
Yes. Completely agree. Companies should play nice, but you should protect yourself just in case.
>they offered to add me as an inventor on the patent application if it meant the applications could stand. I said no
While you can argue patents are only paper, a valuable patent is worth defending. In this case, she was able to demonstrate prior art, meaning that a patent could not be granted since they have no idea to protect since it's been in the public domain (i.e. released to the world) and not an original/non-trivial idea. This is why academic publication, or in the past the use of laboratory journals, are useful in documenting time of the invention.
Sure, there are plenty of people who would refrain from stealing anyway just because it’s morally wrong. But there are enough people who don’t care that the whole idea of property rights becomes meaningless in practice without some way of enforcing them.
Aside from morals, the threat of reciprocation, not by the state specifically but by the property owner who was harmed and anyone authorized to act on their behalf.
Unlike actual property, IP isn't based on reciprocation. The penalties for infringement go way beyond simply losing similar forms of IP.
I'm from a scientific background. Plaigarism is the most serious allegation you can level against someone. This is a whole 'nother level.
MIT is free standing when it comes to their finances. They have a $16.4 billion endowment. So Google (etc) doesn't have economic leverage over them, such that MIT always needs money and can't afford to ever cross large organizations.
If you get three or four of the better schools together in the conflict, Google would beg forgiveness. They desperately need access to the best those schools have to offer, and they know it. That access and relationship is worth more than gold or pride to them. Money? They've got so much they have no idea what to do with it. Get cut out of critical relationships with elite schools and that can take enough of your edge away over time that you start losing in subsequent competitive rounds of don't be killed by tech inflection.
I suppose it's possible she had the idea, saw their kickstarter then submitted a patent to CYA. But then why back the kickstarter? Just feels fishy.
It's basically the BigCo Inc. version of "that's a great idea, I'm glad I thought of it". (and usually patented it too)
Then he notices patent applications about his algorithm and asks Google to help: "Maybe Google could help fighting with it?"
It seems that Google helped by patenting it themselves??? So sad.
https://groups.google.com/a/webmproject.org/forum/#!topic/co...
Correlation != causation, so unless there's evidence that the author had a super specific take on electronics in popup books where the probability of someone independently working on the exact same thing is very low, how can we jump to the conclusion that it must be explanation A?
Disclaimer: I work at at El Goog, but these views are obviously my own. It's entirely possible that explanation A is the truth in this case, but it seems like people are taking it as a foregone conclusion
edit: there are many other stories were Google behaved unethically around patent applications.
Good to know
a. some googlers met Leah for casual/interview talk
b. Leah describes her ideas in detail
c. Said Googlers steal her idea and patent it thinking 2 years is long time
d. Leah comes to know and Google is caught with hand in cookie jar
This is very Google should have practiced the do no evil. Instead they tried to salvage the situation.
In the interim, employee incentives (ego, bonuses) to being listed as an "inventor" while BigCompany remains the "assignee" could be ameliorated with a "Software Patent Hall of Shame" (SPHS), which would list software engineers complicit in software patents.
This would disincentivize software engineers from stealing ideas, from allowing their work to be patented, or from signing agreements which would force them to do so, since doing so would undermine their prospects with future employers, who believe in free and open software and unencumbered computer science research.
And anyway, lots of methods get patented. If it’s new and nonobvious, why should the fact that it runs on a computer matter?
Copyright pales in comparison to the protection afforded by a patent.
Note: I did not instigate the patent process. The company lawyers did. I extricated myself from the process early.
Recommended reading: https://www.amazon.com/Against-Intellectual-Monopoly-Michele...
Industrial secrecy doesn't seem like a better system. Perhaps you'd like shorter term patents, or want to fix some other deficit?
But, if that’s true for software, why isn’t it true for other fields? Simply put: what evidence is there patents are a benefit to society instead of a harm?
Software is different, in that source and decompilation exist, you can't really keep it secret.
Also, there is no such thing as a software patent.
Nothing. Industry secrets is a far better model than giving major corporations access to government power that they can use to crush smaller competition, sometimes for work that they stole from the smaller competition.
I've had patent attorneys show up on a Friday afternoon with a case of beer, to get the entire team to sit in a room and brainstorm patents. Anything goes - doesn't matter if they relate to the field you work in, since the broader company works in almost every field.
As an employee, you are specifically forbidden from googling patents, because you might become aware of prior art. As long as you aren't aware... the reasoning goes that it isn't strictly-speaking illegal.
I can't say I'm surprised that cultures like that result in the sort of thing you experienced.
Kudos for creating something engaging and interesting.
Mangle? "They" is perfectly fine to use in this situation, it's not mangling at all.
Did you learn English before 14th century? Because that's when it emerged.
Anyway, "they" is probably the correct way.
Simple.
1. Assume an ostensibly correct pronoun of your own choice (like you did)
2. If someone corrects you, optionally acknowledge the correction and apologize if applicable, then use the correct pronoun henceforth
3. Ignore the overly gender-obsessed people who tell you that you should have used ugly or cumbersome constructs such as "they" or, even worse, "s/he" and variants thereof.
4. Don't worry too much about it; everybody can make an honest mistake.
In the context of her story, gender is not relevant; she apparently didn't think so either, since the only way I could tell from the article was her hands shown in the last picture.
There's no reason for anyone to get worked up about it.
Simply don't assume? It's not hard.
2. Take the time to use a search engine to look up her name, which is referenced at least two times in screenshots of emails she provides.
3. Click-through to the blog post she links, also written by herself: https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patente...
With that perspective, this board game patent actually looks very good. It certainly isn't an idea that I've thought of before or seen.
Google would reach to incumbent telephone/infrastructure companies and tell them that they want to use their services for some super project. To get well integrated, Google, of course need to know the details/idiosyncrasy of the existing protocols/work around conventions/etc.
So Google employees would receive all the documentation, knowledge/know-how that they could extract.
Then the project would get 'cancelled'. And then, some time later, the 'service provider' would find that Google is implementing similar capabilities that their service is providing, only as part of their some other global initiative that aims at converting majority of infrastructure services to Google.
Perhaps these stories are a reflection of the internal culture characteristic of the 'Do-more-swindle' company.
I see people below recommend NDA/etc. Sure, but US/UK legal system is heavily tilted towards who can hire better lawyers -- and the monopolies win there easily....
I'm not sure about that - my N=1
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
That said, none of the people I knew at Google would blatantly steal other people's ideas. This sounds like a very unethical cluster of employees.
Seems far more appropriate to get toy problems, if that is needed at all, or to get scoped problems but then get reimbursed if it takes several hours.
> Google paid generously for filing patents to help create a defensive portfolio.
> ...you would receive $1000 post-tax per person, up to $3k total
> I left Google in 2009 and the program may have changed since then.
(The events took place in 2014)
But if you have what you think is a patentable invention, file a provisional application before you interview. The USPTO gives you a filing receipt, which might help here. Let your interviewer know you can talk about your invention because you've got a patent pending. It costs $70 to file as a micro entity. See Nolo Press for a good resources on how to do it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/9c7kw6/google_i...
Its a fucked up system but I don't think its as sinister people are making it out to be.
I'm putting on my tin-hat now!
I would suggest having a weekly or monthly brainstorming session over vide chat, or have a wiki or emailing list with a meadow of ideas. Provide that email list as an immutable publicicly indexed and crawlable content.
Put the minutes of those meetings on line, upload the video of the "idea jam sessions" to Youtube, Vimeo, etc.
After a small amount of time, you will stake out ownership of enough avenues of research that it will be hard to patent anything. You don't have to build something to patent it, it doesn't even have to be buildable, meaning you can actually patent "problems" instead of solutions.
Thoughts?
Put in a patent application. Abandon it.
Congratulations, your patent is now going to come up in any competent patent examiner's initial search as "potential prior art".
Patent the core technology (the "you have to do it this way" stuff), but salt the earth around it so nobody can get a patent on the sub-optimal alternatives.
Also leave subtle but important details out of the application. Your conductive ink is silver but has to have, say, palladium added to make it stable? Forget to mention the palladium, and expand the claims to cover mixtures of different metals. See if the examiner allows it.
Not quite right. If an inventor creates something marginally useful at a large company, there's no question that their lawyers will try to patent it. But the purpose is not to prevent research in the area, in fact the opposite. Once a company has a patent on something, they'd likely encourage further research, knowing that they have a financial interest in the research going to market.
All big companies do this, and once the research matures enough to become a product, all the companies have modest claim to it, but they all have an interest to bringing it to market. In some cases, these companies fight who gets what in court (e.g., CRISPR), but in others, they come together and agree on a royalty scheme roughly proportional to their contributions (e.g., MPEG, H.264).
The point is, no company patents something to stop research on that thing, it's quite the opposite.
If you're worried about someone patenting something you created, and you don't care about getting your own patent protection on your invention, you'd likely get more mileage from publishing a detailed blog article than filing a patent application.
(or if a shorter list, what are the licenses that wouldn't?)
Google brigade?
I assumed there was something like that but interesting to see it drawn out.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1?source...
But that's not the worst problem patenting pie menus would have caused:
If I'd patented them, it would have effectively prevented me from using them myself in subsequent proprietary and open source projects, like The NeWS Toolkit, TCL/Tk, The Sims, SimCity, Unity3D, etc.
Convincing Sun or Electronic Arts or any other employer or client to license a patented user interface interaction technique instead of using an inferior freely available one would have been a non-starter, as would have been using it in any open source projects.
It was only because I didn't file a patent that I was able to freely implement pie menus for NeWS at Sun, and use them in SimCity and The Sims.
You're not always going to be working for the same company or attending the same school for the rest of your life, so it's not a good idea to hand over all the rights to your ideas to them, because you'll have to pay if you ever want to use them again yourself. But if you give them away to everyone for free, you get to use them yourself after you leave, and they're free for everyone to use in open source projects.
>Open Sourcing SimCity: Chaim Gingold’s “Play Design” PhD Thesis: "Pie menus play a critical role in The Sim’s user interface design, dovetailing perfectly with the object and AI architecture. Objects advertise verbs to character AI, so it is natural for the verbs to be arranged in a radial menu about objects. I can’t imagine an alternate design that would have had the same widespread usability, and therefore appeal, without them. It is difficult to imagine The Sims without pie menus." -Chaim Gingold, Play Design PhD Thesis, Open Sourcing SimCity
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2...
Unfortunately other people filed misleading patents around pie menus that should never have been granted, because they tried to retroactively redefine what pie menus were by ignoring published prior art, and coined a new term "marking menu" which they defined by a straw man comparison to their self-servingly gerrymandered misunderstanding of pie menus.
So they ended up patenting fictitious "differences" between "marking menus" and "pie menus" that weren't really differences: obvious features pie menus had always had, and that I'd written about and demonstrated in SIGCHI videos, but they'd conveniently ignored, because they needed to trick the patent office into thinking those properties were unique to "marking menus".
Then they misleadingly and systematically used those patents as FUD for decades in their marketing brochures, advertisements, and word of mouth from their sales people on trade show floors. They purposefully discouraged other companies like Kinetix and open source projects like Blender from doing anything remotely resembling pie menus, whether or not they actually infringed on their patents.
https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menu-fud-and-misconceptio...
Huge Problem: Software Patents and FUD
Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”: "Marking Menus. Quickly select commands without looking away from the design. Patented marking menus let you use context-sensitive gestures to select commands."
http://images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/aliasdesign10_detail_b...
There is a sad history of people using software patents to make misleading claims about obvious techniques that they didn’t originate, and constructing flawed straw man definitions of ersatz pie menus to contrast with their own inventions, to mislead the patent examiners into granting patents.
There is a financial and institutional incentive to be lazy about researching and less than honest in reporting and describing prior art, in the hopes that it will slip by the patent examiners, which it very often does.
[...]
The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades
Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).
As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:
"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."
A company is made out of humans
The original post is actually one of TWO patent-related issues that simultaneously happened to me.
The first one was when my crowdfunding campaign backer successfully patented our LED stickers product (https://patentpandas.org/stories/crowdfunding-backer-patente...) despite us having a successful crowdfund, lots of press, research papers dating back to 2011 and an entire business by then.
And then it was about a month after I found out about the LED stickers patent, I found out that Google ATAP was trying to patent work that I had shared during the job interview (https://patentpandas.org/stories/company-patented-my-idea).
While I can understand why the google story is getting more attention, in many ways it’s actually the other story that’s more problematic, because in that case, the faulty patent application actually passed muster at the USPTO and issued as a patent.
This all happened during my last year of grad school at MIT, in the months before I defended my thesis and graduated. And it absolutely sucked!
But in the end, I was pretty lucky that both situations turned out okay(ish). The most important bit was that I had support from all these law clinics, and my own giant institution (MIT), to help me navigate. But I can already see from this thread that many others out there aren’t so lucky.
The absurdity of these situations, and that they were happening to me at the same time, got me to spend the next couple years learning about patent law at the Berkman Klein Center (https://cyber.harvard.edu). My hope was that I could better understand how the heck all this happened, and to see if I could do something to help other creators out.
That’s why I started Patentpandas.org - to have a place to share these patent stories, to help by showing how others navigated their patent problems, and (for folks like my former self) to show that it’s not so scary to work with lawyers and wade into patent law! That’s also why we’re using panda comics to illustrate patent law concepts. Pandas: definitely not scary :)
My hope is that if more creators out there better understand patent law and are connected with pro bono lawyers when they need help, then patent trolls and others who have more legal resources at their disposal won’t be able to get away with things like this so easily.
BTW, I shared all this during my talk for the Patent Pandas launch last week. In case you’re curious to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfCYOWVQehA
Thanks, Jie
When I was at university studying CS I was running a Arduino fansite and a fansite for a videogame - both of whom made most of their money from affiliate revenue (a couple hundred bucks per month).
I thought it would be cool to work at Reddit (was close to graduating), and I had read blog posts from here and various other sites and IRC about how hiring managers liked projects.
I took to it to build a JS library that converted links to affiliate links, for example amazon and some other small retailers I had used.
Basically you just parse any URL you embed in the page with this library and it would convert the existing (non-affiliate) links to affiliate links with your signature attached so you got a revenue share.
In addition to this, I had done research on Reddit's traffics and crawled reddit to see how many affiliate-capable links existed. I talked about this in the interview and suggested they could make around 2 million per month if they hired me and used my script.
--> I was rejected after the interview, but a couple months later Reddit announced it was experimenting with a new feature that would re-write links as affiliate. They ended up implementing this feature that I am 95% sure I came up with and someone else stole.
It was one of the shittiest experiences I have ever had interviewing, especially since I didn't get a job out of it but I believe they have made millions off of this idea so far.
I huge put off, but I've learned since then backstabbing and stealing ideas is a big part of politics in most corporations. What a bummer.
Blogs and fan sites for niche products had been using this to make money for a while, social media sites had not yet tried it.
The close proximity with the announcement and my interview is what really bothered me. I have a strong feeling (but cannot prove) that someone I interviewed with took the idea and ran with it. I had done a lot of research into how much money Reddit would make off of this and how to implement it at scale without breaking existing affiliate links and such.
I had literally planned it as my pitch for what I wanted to work on and why they should hire me.
While it could be totally an accident, I could also see it being stolen. Truth is, I will never know if it was just bad timing or an actual malicious interviewer.
https://metatalk.metafilter.com/11174/Im-proposing-a-small-c...
I guess the best thing for you to do it in such a situation is to open source it so the whole community can benefit from it, not just one big evil company that steals ideas. At least you'd go down as a hero.
Reddit partners with VigLink (2016): https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.reddit.com/r/announcements/...
Hope this helps you move on.
It wasn't a new idea then either. The founder of VigLink reached out to me then to share what they were working on.
Ironically, making my stuff open source has cut down a lot on that. (Github leaves a clear provenance trail.)
Obviously I don't know how the rest of the interview went, but the way you put it in the retelling makes it sound a lot like it was distracting from all the other reasons to hire you.
"How about that two million guy?" - "We hire developers, not libraries"
It might have been that they not only picked up the idea from the interview, but on top of that also did not hire you because of misplaced conditions. If that part came over more like "you can't if you don't", then it would be seen as a challenge: "sure we can". I think that just telling them that you have previously worked on link monetization and wrote a library about it would have been a much better interview strategy than dangling some made up number in front of their faces. As an interviewer I would fear that a candidate arguing like that would be prone to taking their regular salary as granted and renegotiate something on top for every quantifiable contribution.
Because capitalist organizations are literally founded upon the act of constant appropriation of the surplus value created by their own employees, it's not reasonable to expect these organizations to somehow indulge a higher standard of treatment toward outside persons who aren't even their employees, to persons who are just dropping by to share ideas and work. Such organizations will seize with both hands whatever of value is presented to them. They seize, that's what they do. All day, every day.
Oops
The situation certainly seems like it.
You seem to be sort of acknowledging the contradiction in this one. If the conversation is guarded (self-protecting vulnerability) or indirect, then it isn't being frank.
but not really, that's software after all. engineering is applied math, so largely software modeling, whereas CS is theoretical work. abstract problems, pure solutions.
It's applied math and applied science. The science informs how to apply the math, since the math is a model of natural phenomena. In fact, most of the math came to engineering via the science.
Engineering and science are not math, even though they use math, and engineering is not science, even though it uses science. They are all very different disciplines.
I'm with Alan Kay when he says "computer science" used to be an aspiration and eventually became a misnomer. Same with software engineering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY
(Doesn't mean CS and SE are always "worse" than science and engineering. But they are currently very different.)
- Michael R. Fellows, Ian Parberry (1993) "SIGACT trying to get children excited about CS"
Sadly, if you want to learn proper theory (what I consider to be CS) you have to get lucky and find a mathematics program that has electives so you can focus on things like discrete mathematics and information theory.
Mostly, yes, especially as an undergrad. A science forms and tests hypotheses, usually about natural phenomena. I only had a few classes in CS where we tested any hypotheses or performed any real experiments. Most of it was design and learn by rote, and not experimentation.
Theoretic Computer Science is pretty sciencey but is testing things engineers built and often testing using math rather than experiment. Algorithms and data structures use the result of some science, but don’t teach or perform much science normally. Graphics involves a lot of cross-discipline physics and math, but in practice is teaching techniques and APIs, and doing very little scientific experimentation.
Machine learning may be bringing more science into computer science. People are certainly running lots of experiments in ML today trying to figure out how neural networks behave. A lot of it is still engineering too, of course, but there is some science in there.
But, I think it would be good to include more philosophy of science - what does it mean to do science - at the undergrad level.
I do agree that none of them are doing science, but one is studying science itself, the other is studying a slightly different thing.
"The United Democratic States of North America not including Canada" would be quite the name.
"The Federal Republic of the Democratic United States of America"
(I've been in Africa waaaaay too long :) )
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-10/american-...
/s
I have no personal stake in this one way or the other, but it's an interesting thought-experiment. If that version of events were true, would anyone be able to tell? Is it really any less plausible than the "official" version?
Am I missing something obvious or is it really omitted?
Edit: possibly (probably?) https://twitter.com/qijie
Edit: Doh. It's Jie Qi :)
I'm always impressed at how big a difference it can make to go from "people know this is a problem" to "there's a central place to see what this problem looks like and how much damage it can cause".
Which a patent does too, just with a license or 20 years later. It keeps people from reinventing the wheel and gives the disclosure rights even if they didn't have the infrastructure to create or monetize on their own. This isn't one of those nefarious software patents where the whole thing would be obsolete within 5 years, this is LED books, which simply becomes more feasible as transistor sizes shrink and battery technology improves, perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period before falling into the public domain where it can be vastly more practical to create in 2033.
> perfect for a 20 year exclusivity period
So for 20 years, if I wish to create and sell a book with transistors I have to license the idea from google (that is if they're even willing to give me a license)?
And somehow having to go through that legal loophole will keep the art of creating LED books alive? You seriously believe that?
Does the patent have complex details which would take longer than 20 years for someone to independently discover about creating LED books? If so, people do save time by waiting 20 years and then reading the patent, but that seems extremely unlikely.
No. Google wasn't supposed to try and patent it.
I responded to a very specific piece of the article which seemed to ignore that patent applications functioning as prior art is available to subculture enthusiasts too.
The whole concluding paragraph was about making ideas that other people can build from, it wasn't about LED books in general. They want ideas to be available for others to build from but don't want others to patent it, ignoring that attempting to patent it yourself also fixes this, no matter how you actually use the patent or failed/abandoned application.
(Although, I'll concede that patenting is an expensive bet that not everyone would have the money or risk tolerance for.)
- The common advice is for practitioners to avoid learning about existing patents, because this knowledge increases liability in case you are found to infringe. This means that the body of patented work is really only useful for patent lawyers, rather than for inventors.
- Similarly, patents are not written in ways to instruct practitioners to use techniques, but instead crafted in legal terms to claim broad areas of application while skirting previously filed patent claims. This again makes the patent library only useful to lawyers.
- In areas where patents are not common, there is a green field for patent applications that patent common techniques. This happened in software and business methods, and the article suggests it is happening in the junction of enthusiasts and crafts.
But inventors not using parent literature is catastrophically bad. So many applications are repeated, in some fields the same thing is "invented" over and over because people don't even makea cursory attempt to understand the technology in the field vs the products available.
Being unaware of infringement, but not by willful negligence, is actually a defence against an award of damages in the UK. Precisely to protect this fundamental tier of the patent system.
If people can't use the disclosures then the system serves virtually no purpose.
That's not quite true - although disclosure is an often argued benefit of the patent system, there are very few inventions that cannot be copied once a working item is in someone's hands, so a formal disclosure is not necessarily required to be able to build upon and extend existing work.
But even without disclosure, when appropriate patents are granted, they can "[secure] for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" even if the patent library is not useful for research.
Of course it also serves the public to encourage inventors by giving them a limited exclusive use. But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.
Yes.
> But primarily when instigated the purpose is a mutual benefit that is best embodied by education of the public arena as to the mechanisms and working of an invention.
This is the debate - how significant is the "education" aspect in promoting progress and public benefit? Is incentivizing new creation sufficient to promote progress without the (lacking) education aspect?
Then the whole question of whether the limited monopolies really create those incentives or just magnify profits that would already exist and open the door for abuse.
Actually it forces people to reinvent the wheel in possibly worse ways.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html "modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so... a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. "
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... "companies that maximize profits by firing employees, avoiding taxes, selling shoddy products or polluting the environment can harm their shareholders more than helping them."
In which case are they really maximizing profits? Wouldn't it depend upon the risk and costs of those options verses their benefits?
It's like genetic algorithms that look like they don't work because someone miscalculated exactly what the fitness function was optimizing.
"Independent creation" is a valid defense for copyright, but not for patents.
Something cannot be patented if prior art exists before the filing of the patent. It doesn't matter if you knew about it. Even if you can prove that the prior art is not something you were aware of at the time you filed for a patent, your patent is invalid.
That's how patents are supposed to work; inventions must be "non-obvious" to the point where no one else has ever created it nor described it before on the entire planet.
If google knows that someone else has created such things (as they must have after said visit), the only responsible thing to do is not file a patent, regardless of if they independently worked on it.
Friend of mine is an engineer with a law degree that works on patents. What he said was not obvious doesn't really catch what's going on. He said a patent is really a set of answers to a set of questions. The answers are usually obvious when you know what the questions are, but what questions are and why they are significant isn't obvious. That's where the work is.
A job interview is not a public disclosure and so doesn't count as prior art. So novelty is not affected.
However, the applicant must derive rights (employment, assignment) from the inventor in order to apply for a patent.
In UK IIRC S.13 of the Patents Act allows an inventor to file to be named as the inventor (or co-inventor) and for the patent to be reassigned accordingly.
Of course taking Google to court is going to be a hard slog.
There are innumerable ways to implement an electronic book each novel and non-obvious way could qualify for its own patent.
afaiu, US patent office (as opposed to European) is much more relaxed about giving away patents and relies more on courts to settle disputes after the fact. That is an American patent is more likely to be revoked.
If a company wants to steal your patent they will "surround" your idea with other patents: method of manufacturing <idea>, method of using <idea> in <industry>, <idea> used in adjacent use case. This is a legal but slimy way to force the sale of your idea since now only they can profitably commercialize it.
"Easily", if you have deep pockets to foot all the legal costs.
Big companies know this, hence I don't think it was an innocent misunderstanding. The fact that they wouldn't even add OP as an assignee on the patent just reinforces my view that they were acting in bad faith.
OP was lucky to catch this before the patent was issued.
And google of all companies have the resources to swat away patent lawsuits with so much prior art.
Ironically that’s what they ended up doing, but i doubt it was on purpose.
> It was a tough choice: I had just started the first year of my PhD and would’ve had to take a leave from the program to pursue this project. After asking many people, the advice was clear: stay in school. So I decided to turn down the offer and continue pursuing my PhD.
...this sounds like terrible advice? I have to wonder whether any of the "many people" consulted weren't professors.
I left a very good position on the table after my undergrad, in favor of pursuing a graduate degree. I weighed my options and decided that I would rather spend some years in my youth learning how to conduct research -- lessons I believed, and still believe, will carry through into my future endeavors. I picked up an excellent job after my Master's (at the same place I had left behind previously!) and am very happy with how things played out.
I realize this is the best possible outcome, but what makes this general arc such a bad idea?
It sounds like you would agree that joining a PhD program is not a good idea.
Some PhD programs focus on non-marketable topics that don't help candidates develop marketable skills, and exist only to dump the research group's drudge work on an unsuspecting soul.
Wasting years of your life in a low-pay low opportunity dead-end job that's prone to abuse just to pursuit a pipe dream is not a great career move, particularly if the alternative is landing a job at Google.
Some people enjoy scholarship and research. There are places that support this. To generalize only slightly unfairly, most of industry is not conducive to this kind of personal goal. Pipe dream it may be, but we still have artists and musicians.
And I say that as a manager who’s hired a lot of people before they earned X because their work was interesting. I don’t do it anymore, as a rule, because it crushed a lot of those people with regret later and I have to live with that.
You don’t get a lot of opportunities to earn a PhD, most people never get the chance. By comparison almost everyone in CS get a lot of truly great job opportunities in their lives.
That’s a PhD, we had a habit of hiring people before their finished they CS degrees because skilled people were so hard to come by back in the day. They have good careers as far as I know, but they would have had much better opportunities if they had finished their degrees, and some of them haven’t taken that well.
I went to a State school and got an economics degree, I started my career as a SQL-lackey for a B.I department in declining midwestern retailer, but I treated my career like graduate school insofar that I worked hard at it.
About 4 years after my first day of professional work, I started as a data scientist at a FANG. My team of 9 had 3 Ph.Ds (all science Ph. Ds). As I understood it, the Ph.Ds do receive higher compensation but it's not that much more (~18% higher base) and if I really kick butt, I can out earn them with bonuses.
But I think my path was much easier and lucrative. I was able to save ~$100k, I had a standard of living above that of a regular graduate student and I had flexibility that they would dream of. I made 4 years worth of contacts of my profession, I
I'm sure some Ph.Ds are worth it as investments, but if you're interested in renumeration, get working.
It shouldn’t be, but it is way more difficult to get high level professional qualifications when you’re older. The expectation that reaearch students are young is quite embedded.