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Comment by UseStrict | Hacker News Reader

Upper management probably all patted themselves on the back after cutting the payouts. They'll tout that they "saved the company thousands, every year." In most industries innovation is key, cutting engineer pay for what is essentially voluntary work is setting themselves up for obsoletion in the near future. I don't blame the guy for "not remembering" what his boss was talking about.

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I imagine that someone looked at the program and saw it as largely a waste of money -- that it's unlikely that the patents being churned out at 2-3 a week, as IP were not worth the money they were paying for them, and a side-door bonus for engineering staff, they were not the most efficient means to talent retention & compensation.

It seems the better solution might have been to tighten up the review process -- keep the money the same but accept fewer. If the individual contributor in question was really as good as reported, he would have been untouched.

this is the solution for sure. Having been through the patent process myself, I can't imagine what sort of BS patents they were churning out for an engineer to be able to have 2-3 a week. Making them conditional to review would have really improved on this

That's 2-3 a week across the entire company (of unknown size), not a single engineer.

> I can't imagine what sort of BS patents they were churning out for an engineer to be able to have 2-3 a week.

I interpret that part of the question as the program as a whole seeing 2-3 patents per week, spread over the entire engineering team.

The employee in question produced 30 patents over two years -- still an astonishing rate, but evidently worthwhile because 'all of these inventions are used in our products'.

Not really astounding. That's 1 or 2 per month. It's a reasonable amount. It's far from what a patent mill or patent troll could generate.

> I can't imagine what sort of BS patents they were churning out for an engineer to be able to have 2-3 a week

Valuable IP often has several implementations. When I go through the process of parenting something, usually 3 - 5 different ways to accomplish similar goals are patented. Building a patent moat if you will.

Further, not all patents need to be highly valuable. Volume almost matters as much as quality, because you’re less likely to be sued if you have the ability to counter sue with 2000 patents. Each patent infringement needs to be defended which costs thousands a piece.

When Samsung and Apple started going at it. It woke up most of the larger companies to that. BS or not, still value if they have an semblance of an idea

From the post it seems like they were. They'd get from $300 to $5000 and the engineer in question seemed to be hitting the upper range most of the time.

> they were not the most efficient means to talent retention & compensation

And yet they are about to lose a senior engineer who is nearly invaluable to the company over $110k of previous bonuses. Funny, that.

> It seems the better solution might have been to tighten up the review process -- keep the money the same but accept fewer.

I'd argue that with tighter restriction, you'd need to increase the payoff, to compensate the increased workload.

The same Upper management will move on to other companies now, and make them obsolete too.

There is no way to prove they did bad at their previous jobs.

"Innovation is key" is a mantra that sounds good, but it's not true. It's what people want to believe. It's like saying you need to constantly buy lottery tickets so you don't risk being a poor retiree.

If you have established a business and you bank on "innovation" your likelihood of anything from a net loss to catastrophic failure is actually quite high. In the long run, most companies fail anyway, whether they attempt to innovate or not.

Case in point, those companies that did survive in the S&P 500 since its inception don't strike me as particularly innovative:

http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2017...

>Case in point, those companies that did survive in the S&P 500 since its inception don't strike me as particularly innovative:

Really? Except food i think there has been lots of innovation in the particular industries. Care to name innovative examples?

Even in food, you'd find a lot of innovation, in packaging, processing, additives...

3M, Dow, DuPont, Boeing, IBM, J&J, Lockheed, Monsanto, and lot of others on the list do quite innovative stuff. Its the just that failures get publicized by the news cycle as a waste of money and successes do not.

Or the probably bad reading of Clayton Christensen that concludes that big businesses simply can’t innovate.

Most of the companies that did not survive did so because they did not innovate, they did not change with the times, that did not respond to market pressures or changes

Do you honestly believe these companies failed because they innovated too much?

That’s like a list of the most innovative companies in America. Do you know how much technology goes into say paper making? At Georgia Tech we had an entire research institute for paper science.

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