[TUHS] ATC'25 is the last ATC?

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Wed, May 14, 2025 at 12:16:04PM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> I started at Sun after you left, and don't know when they started but
> patent bonuses were common in the 2000's at Sun.  They paid up to
> $2000/person, with a max of $6000/team, when a patent was filed.
> (Based on a 2004 slide deck encouraging us to file more patents,
> I never got one to verify. They did emphasize they wanted patents for
> defensive reasons, including cross-licensing deals, not to attack other
> companies.)

What I was at IBM, they paid $500/engineer, with a max of $2000/team
for a patent being filed, with another $500/engineer if the patent was
granted.  It was quite common for IBM'ers to set up patent
brainstorming teams of 4 people each (to max out the team limit), and
the patents did't have to be related to what your department was
working on.  You could be in the IBM Linux Technology Center, and if
you had an idea for something that might be novel in virtual reality,
or massive multiplayer online games, or ways that AI could be applied
in a health care context, it was all fair game.

A particular patent team could be potentially responsible for dozens
of patent filings, so it could be real money, especially if you were a
relatively underpaid level 5 SWE.  (Yeah, it wasn't as a big of a deal
if you were a band 10 STSM.)  It wasn't formally organized by
management, but the fact that these teams exited and the resulting
patents were of relatively low quality (in my humble opinion), this
couldn't have come as a surprise to them.

(From a defensive perspective, quantity was far more important than
quality, after all.  The patent system is so totaly screwed up....)

But as far as papers were concerned, an accepted paper at ATC was
worth (at best) brownie points at performance review time, at least in
my part of the company.  Combine that with the extreme difficulty in
getting travel expense approval, it's pretty clear what management
really thought about publishing being part of the job.

Creating presentations for VP's, or spending all day in Fall Plan
meetings justifying budget line items down to the SWE-month
granularity?  (And then after those plans become totally obsolete once
the budget was handed down from on high, then there was Spring
Re-plan....)  Sure that was definitely part of the job.  Publishing
papers?  Not so much.

						- Ted