Patent office filters out worst telework abuses in report to its watchdog

So USPTO employees are lying about time spent looking for prior art, among other things. I thought the system was only conceptually flawed, but nope, it's also corrupt throughout.

I wonder how much of this was due the problem where paralegals had literally had nothing to do.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/07/3...

"The underworked paralegals did little as a backlog of appeals of patent examinations that many of them were hired to help process doubled from about 12,500 in fiscal 2009 to 25,300 last year. Soon after the appeals board brought on additional legal support staff to address a deluge of challenges to decisions by patent examiners, the Patent and Trademark Office imposed a hiring freeze that halted hires of judges needed to handle the appeals."

"... an examiner missed 304 hours of work in a year but was paid for the time. Despite warnings, this examiner kept cheating and was caught twice but not fired."

In the coming years, I hope there will be a major realignment of what we know as "work hours" and everything that goes with it in the US. The federal government is surprisingly progressive in regards to telecommuting (teleworking as it's called, still sounds weird after many years) but failure of management to keep up with what their employees are doing will ruin it for everyone.

I telecommute a couple of days a week. Monthly, that means I save about 20-30 hours of travel and preparation, and about $50-100 in gas. On those days, I sleep in more than I normally would and am thus very alert for doing thinking-work. Despite doing work that can be done 100% remotely, I still cherish time spent in office and the kind of lateral communication you can get from it. However, telecommuters will always have to work harder to look like they're doing any work at all. Meanwhile, just showing up at the office can be enough for most idlers; I suspect this is the real reason that reviews in the article are hitting a brick wall: it's not just the telecommuters that don't work.

From where I sit, problem is with management and way management is done in the federal system. There is a huge layer of middle management in any federal organization, and they are very ill-equipped to manage anyone, let alone telecommuters - who are more vulnerable to and susceptible to slackery. Even a good manager will find the federal system a giant mess: if you inherit a trouble employee and honestly try to bring them back into a productive mode, you might face a lawsuit and delays associated with them - because that's almost a norm in the federal system now.

So what you do is put the employee in a PIP (performance improvement plan) and in there, you spell out the improvement steps the employee needs to take. Wait, no, you don't put the person in a PIP because HR kicks it back as previous managers didn't document anything. Now, you have to wait, beg the employee to do their work that they refuse to do (as their position description was never revised despite the kind of work they're expected to do changing with the times). Over time, you alter the PD and start documenting. After awhile, you put the employee in PIP and note that your corrective steps were completely ignored by the employee on the file. And ... that's when the union gets involved: why did you PIP a model employee? None of their previous managers documented any issues, and they received glowing reviews for years.

At this point, you are completely ineffective as a manager, with no human-facing tools to do your management job properly. Management needs to step it up, and for that to happen effectively, there needs to be a development of fair disciplinary methods and realistic processes to deal with workers in the federal system.