Comment Re:You poor baby (Score 4, Funny) 277
The article is pretty lame, and appears to merely be ad click-bait.
Well, he does work from home. Be a sucker and click on a link so he can have a cup of coffee.
The article is pretty lame, and appears to merely be ad click-bait.
Well, he does work from home. Be a sucker and click on a link so he can have a cup of coffee.
I'll admit that for my first five years or so, yes, I was intentionally drowning myself in work, and I loved it. I came into the organization with several skills they had been lacking, and jumped on every opportunity to apply them. Now they are training others to do those tasks as well, and I have spent the last few years learning to moderate my workload. What I got out of those hectic years, though, was the trust and respect of my colleagues and superiors.
I frequently play the role of the shielded guru, but I'm also not afraid to jump into the politics of a decision when it's necessary to get the job done. And when I say "job", I mean "project"--since I consider my job to be getting the project done regardless, not just my part of it.
I'm proactive about learning new tools and often have features ready before they're asked for (but I would never fly myself to a conference for the heck of it--they did pick some extreme examples for the paper).
Most importantly, I earned the reputation of someone who will get the job done no matter what, because I always have the right skill or contact to fill in the missing pieces.
You sound like an excellent engineer, but it takes a very adept manager to make sure all the bases are covered when everyone sticks to their job description precisely. Having members of the team who "lead from within" is a very valid way to share responsibility for a project without having to find a "star manager" who can direct everything himself. And taking the time to understand how your piece fits into the rest of the project should be part of your job no matter what your philosophy, even if your boss doesn't tell you to do it explicitly--perhaps this, in particular, is what the poster really needs to work on.
An interesting observation, though, is that this study was completed in 1999, which was some time ago. My organization has been around for much longer than that, so our corporate culture still has many of the "old ways" ingrained in it. It could be that their research is not as applicable to newer companies, but I would very surprised if there were not a significant degree of similarity.
This IEEE article is the only answer the poster needs. I read it all the way through, and it is spot on, matching my personal experience. I sometimes wondered what exactly I had done to garner such high praise from my colleagues and managers, but as it turns out I was doing all nine of their "Star Work Habits". Paraphrasing some of their findings with my experience:
Those "needless conversations" are where you can ask about other people's projects and experiences. Find out what their areas of expertise are so you can go to them when you need help, or can point others in direction--becoming a clearing-house for technical advice makes you conspicuously valuable and is a great way to gain exposure to all sorts of people and problems in your organization.
At the same time, you can also discover other opportunities. When I first joined as an intern, I quickly became part of the team by volunteering to help out on projects way above my pay grade because knew I had the skills to do them as well or better than the senior engineers. By delivering quality work on those assignments, my boss put me on the fast-track to more interesting projects and responsibilities.
More advanced forms of "communication" include knowing when to push back against your boss on requirements or schedule in order to benefit the organization in the long term, proactively stepping in to resolve conflicts among teammates, promoting others' good ideas when they are not being heard, and learning the ins and outs of the corporate culture so you can communicate effectively with other departments and managers.
It may seem like a waste of time, but you can learn a lot of valuable information by listening to the old-timers ramble on about this and that. More importantly, if you listen to their stores, they will be more willing to help you out when you need their advice.
So my immediate advice for the poster is: Get out there, chat with your coworkers at lunch or the water cooler, and don't worry too much about keeping track of how many dogs they have or where they went to vacation last year. Do ask them about technical topics or share what you are working on--it may be a more comfortable topic for them as well, and vastly more useful.
First of all, your argument is flawed because if a small inventor tried to sue a big company, if there was no cost shifting he would go bankrupt even if he won--which is why they almost never even try. Their only way to monetize a patent is by selling it.
Second, the point of this provision is to destroy the patent troll business model. Right now, when someone receives a patent troll extortion letter, they pay it because even if they know the claim is bullshit it will cost them more to prove it in court than to settle. With this provision in place, folks will be more comfortable blowing off wildly off-base infringement accusations because they know if they go to court they will get their fees paid. The trolls have no intention of taking those cases to court, and rely on fear to keep people paying, so this means there will be no more cases on the docket than before, but the trolls will get less money and society wins.
Type 3a firms are good--they buy patents from inventors and seek out companies who want to bring in new ideas by buying or licensing a patent.
Type 3b firms are patent trolls--they buy patents and seek out companies already using the patent in order to extort money from them.
The problem is that in many fields (like software and computer design) there are simply so many engineers working on any given problem that it is almost impossible to avoid the simultaneous/independent invention of any given idea. In that environment, telling one inventor that he has to pay someone else because they did the paperwork first is an insult to his intelligence. This is compounded by the fact that so many ideas are either a) mathematically optimal, which anyone could derive and everyone wants to use, and/or b) part of an interoperability standard where licensing constraints reduce competition, derivative works, open-source tools, etc.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.