Patent Recognition

One of the things the Shitshow likes to brag about is patents.  Often times you'll here the flunktional managers and zookeepers brag about how many patents their department was awarded this year and how these accomplishments help distinguish this Shitshow from other Shitshows.   Well guess what?  99.99% of these patents are a complete waste of money.  How could this be?  Let me explain. 

When an engineer submits a patent that finally gets awarded, the engineer receives a nice little monetary bonus.  The bonus isn’t anything to write home about but if you add up 3 or 4 of these each year it makes for some nice spending cash.  Their flunktional manager also gets accolades for helping promote the technical advancement in their function.  Seems like a win-win doesn’t it?  This is where you’d be wrong. 

In order to work on these patents the mad scientists (I mean engineers) have to try to find funding for it on a project.  Thus they’ll hold out and only work on a program if they have the opportunity to advance their patent.  The thing is, the patent usually doesn’t add anything useful to the program because the patent is just a patent for patent sakes and the accompanied cash award.  In fact, sometime the overall design the program ends up with is less than it should be in order to support the work of a patent. 

In the background the flunktional manager helps push the program to pursue the patent because it gives one of their people a program charge number, the primary goal of a flunktional manager.  Since the program actually needs the engineers support they basically have to fund a useless patent.  And since the money isn’t the flunktional manager’s money, he could care less. 

The flunktional manager will refute this argument and claim that patent work has to be done partially on the engineers own time.  Again, this sounds good in theory but no one works for free and the time of patent work vs. work really needed gets blurred and all charged to the program. 

Because patent recognition is just a pattern of waste, I throw rocks.