IBM scraps rewards program for staff inventions, wipes away cash points | Big Blue staffers aren’t pleased to lose out on potential bonuses::Big Blue staffers aren’t pleased to lose out on potential bonuses
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…
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!
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.
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.
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.
