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Nothing like informing your employees that hard work won’t be rewarded. Wise business decision
It's even more insane when you find out that IBM has a history of forcing their employees to sign contracts that state that anything that their employees work on at home in their own free time, is the property of IBM
A company where I applied wanted me to do that as well. I was going to be a truck driver..
I'm not defending this, but this is an extremely common practice in the US.
No it’s not.
If this were such a common practice there would hardly be any US contributors to open source projects.
The legal practice is common. Enforcement is significantly more challenging (particularly when you're working under an online alias in a niche space).
IP assignment is extremely common, but there are almost always exceptions that you still own the IP if it's your own time, your own equipment, and not directly related to what you do for your employer.
It also extends to other fields.
Disney has this rule on all artistic creations of it's employees
If hard work was rewarded, the richest people in the world would be African miners, Chinese manufacturing workers, and Indian telemarketers.
Besides, why do we need a bunch of enthusiastic PhD candidates with decades of experience developing, testing, and refining novel applications of technology? We've got AI! AI will do everything for us, starting tomorrow and onwards until forever!
Next step: no more free coffee in the office.
That's one of the fastest ways to lose the top 20% of your workforce.
They tried that years ago in Australia - it didn't last long.
IBM doesn't make stuff, just invent and own IP. And now they don't even invent.
It's funny how the big tech companies are getting worse, to the point where engineers are favouring a return to "boomer tech" because they treat their employees well long-term - and now the older companies that focused on research and consultancy are starting to become shit at that.
IBM is boomer tech.
What do you mean by boomer tech?
I imagine going back to the ways of 1960s IBM/Bell Labs where you have a secure, well-defined role, you are well compensated for your time and you have plenty of like-minded people to bounce ideas off.
Who wanted to eliminate that? My Grama used to work at Bell Labs as a researcher when it was in Manhattan, she always looked back fondly on those chapters of her life. Startups are fun, but Christ are they unstable and you're wearing 11teen hats simultaneously.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Exclusive IBM has canceled a program that rewarded inventors at Big Blue for patents or publications, leaving some angry that they are missing out on potential bonuses.
By cancelling the scheme, a source told The Register, IBM has eliminated a financial liability by voiding the accrued, unredeemed credits issued to program participants which could have been converted into potential cash awards.
We're told that IBM's invention review process could take months, meaning that employees just didn't have time between the announcement and the program sunset to pursue the next plateau and cash out.
Citing the revised award scheme, one question read, "Do we allow customers to unilaterally cancel the payment schedule after work has been delivered?"
We're told these represented the most upvoted questions submitted to the CEO's recent monthly Office Hours meeting, but the response was evasive.
A former IBMer reports that a colleague still with Big Blue said, "My opinion...the invention award program was buggered a long time [ago].
The original article contains 471 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Bigger companies are forced to do such programmes. I was working on a software tool for managing these ideas.
The problem I see here, is the software was boring, the project was boring and the users in charge are bored, too. There is hardly anyone who takes the process serious.
I'm not surprised, by IBM's decision. However, I think they waste a lot of potential by not listening properly to their employers.
Seems shortsighted at best.
When I was at IBM I won three such awards — one for publication, and two for patents.
At the time at least, they had an online form you had to fill in if you thought something you had developed was potentially patentable; that would go to some small committee for analysis and a decision as to whether or not it was worth pursuing — if it was, it went off to the patent lawyers. You then spent a good deal of time describing your invention to them so they could write up all of the patent documents in a manner that would cover as many bases as possible.
The awards weren’t huge. I don’t remember getting a monetary award for the publication — just a framed certificate. The patents paid $1500 CAN each.
At least one of the patented inventions would have happened anyway, because it was just a solution I came up with during the course of my work. I didn’t even consider submitting it as a patentable idea until a few team members encouraged me to do so. But if there wasn’t a monetary award I would have been less likely to fill out the form for the patent in the first place. All IBM is likely going to find by removing the award is that a lot fewer people (outside IBM Research) are going to have incentive to self-declare their potentially patentable ideas.
Hello fellow ex-IBMer. I came to the corp from an open source background and I was happy that my LTC coworkers seemed to despise software parents despite the huge pressure from management.
I wonder how much of this is that IBM fell out of the patent lead and decided to just take their ball and go home. Or how much is RedHat influence shifting the mindset away from the patent Mexican standoff with everyone else.
It’s been 25 years for me, so fortunately the patents have all expired (technically it was more than 2 because of publication in a few different countries, but it was for two inventions). However, during the time when they were all still valid I always had to tread a fine line with other employers — one the one hand, of course they’re on my resume (and LinkedIn profile). But on the other, if they knew about the contents of the inventions and someone in our organization ran afoul of them, they at least needed some plausible deniability that they didn’t know about the contents of the inventions. And for at least one of them, I always feared if they knew about it they might be tempted to try to use it, and be driven insane by the knowledge that if they did, IBM could sue them into the ground 🤣.
I did have a pre-existing Open Source project from prior to working at IBM which I ensured was adequately documented prior to my employment. It was eventually forked and became an IBM alphaWorks project — I never got any money for it (they offered, but it was a pathetic amount for losing all rights to my own pre-existing code that took years of effort), and after leaving IBM had to go back to working on the original pre-IBM codebase.
Overall, my experience at IBM as an inventor/innovator wasn’t great, but was better than most other organizations I’ve worked for since. Honestly, I wish we could just remove software patents altogether, making IBM’s move here moot.
There's a way for Big Blue staffers to resist the shaft.
this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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