Engineering Management

I firmly believe the shortage of young engineers is relevant to our career guidance in our education system. Guidance counselors are failing to develop the talent that already exists. I have taken notice to professionals who could of been engineers, but it is the lack of time and financing for them to go back to school.

I couldn't agree with you more on the education & training! I do notice more women in the environmental/civil/chemical disciplines and less in others.

Give them the right to toss disruptive students out of the classroom, and re-institute actual vocational education starting around 10th grade for any one who cannot cut the academics.

I would go a step farther and push to require more basic technology classes like wood shop, auto shop etc... and before 10th grade; lots of people don't find out they enjoy working with their hands until after they receive their Master or Doctorate in paper pushing and find themselves stuck in a crappy job that doesn't provide any personal satisfaction; by then it's generally too late.

And let's stop paying CEO's and their ilk like they hung the moon, I doubt they could even find it. More often then not when a company fails it isn't because of the underpaid folks downstairs and when a company succeeds it is not likely to have been because of the over-paid nincompoop with the big desk.

Great response Dave

I'll reflect on what you said later, just want to see were this goes and what happens next. GA so far. Were are you?

Thanks! I am in Silicon Valley, California.

There is a lot of engineering work that does not have to do with inventing.

Unless you suggest that create=invent

Gotta love that! GA

"A shortage of engineers" is a mis-nomer. There are plenty of good, eager but unemployed or under-employed engineers already out there. The only shortage we have are engineers who are willing to be treated as slaves.

Companies have been crying about "not enough engineers" since at least the late 1970s, yet generally engineer employment has dropped every year since. Few of us have been lucky enough to NOT be replaced by a new graduate or outsourced person (probably in another country). Often our replacements are under-qualified, but they are hired because they will work long hours cheaply. The net effect has hurt many companies and has been showing in our economy for decades, but still companies squandor engineering talent. Why are they surprised that their pool of talent is sparse when they keep kicking talent out of the pool?

The next generation, same as the previous generation, realizes that engineering is not a stable or well paying or honored career. We have to turn that around before we can expect more people to attempt that career choice. If we punished businessmen who take bad advantage of engineers, along with stealing money while ruining their companies, maybe we could turn the tide. But that is a huge undertaking. Engineers won't do it because they'd rather stay wrapped up in their technology. Businessmen won't do it to themselves. Politicians won't do it because they're paid off by businessmen. We've taught at least two generations not to fight the system, but to take advantage of it.

You'd think that this latest recession is a screaming wake-up call. If you really want to be an engineer, better plan to move to China or the like where at least you might be able to live on the pittance you'll be paid.

Good points, and well known. The recent discussions in the engineering media of the problems with the patent system apply here, I think.

Currently, all employers require their employees, especially engineers, to sign an employee agreement that assigns to the employer all inventions created during the term of employment with few exceptions. The only (legally required) exceptions are inventions provably created on the employee's own time and are not directly related to the company's business. Since large corporations engage in many businesses, the agreement covers any invention created by the employee. And you have to sign. They are universal among all employers, and no signature, no job.

When challenged, defenders of the status quo say that the engineer is paid by the company to design and invention is "part of their job." Their argument, "When a company pays an engineer a salary, the company is making an investment that the engineer actually produces something useful. The invention is the return on the company investment." implies that the company is hiring an inventor, not an employee worker. Few employers interpret it this way. Also if this were true, then this clause of the employee agreement could not apply to non-engineers - who must also sign.

But this argument is not true on its face. Engineers are not hired to invent. They are hired to do design or other straightforward engineering tasks. If they do not do these tasks well, they are laid off or fired, regardless of their patents. And they do not get paid to invent. If you submit an invention disclosure which results in a patent, you get *nothing* for it in most companies. Perhaps a $25 plaque for your wall, at best.

An exception. One company I worked for - AMD - paid $2,000 to the engineer for each patent granted. And $1,000 even if you had left the company. And it was the only one. Honor is due.

Engineer inventors have started to passively resist. The inventor knows inventions and patents are valuable, and so does the company. But rather than be rewarded for the invention, the inventor is paid nothing extra and does not share in the revenue the invention generates. Worse, the engineer-s manager often sees the extra work to file the disclosure as distracting the employee from the daily job to be done.

So, many engineers have decided to not to invent. Or more specifically, not to file invention disclosures for patent. Their efforts are not rewarded or even treated as a gift above and beyond the job. And the "above and beyond" part is what formally distinguishes a patentable invention from conventional design.

If, instead of rewarding effort, you ignore it or even discourage it, you will get less of it. If patentable inventions are discouraged at the source - the inventor, you will get less of them, and fewer new businesses as a result. This is directly counter to the stated intention of the patent office of encouraging invention.

One radical proposal is to change the ownership of the patent for invention. The idea is that only the individual inventor can own a patent. The inventor can chose to license the invention by contract, but the ownership stays with the inventor. License to use an invention would be negotiated for each invention, after the invention.

This would make a patent more like a copyright. If you work for a company and write a book on your own time, the company owns no part of the royalties - trade and government secrets notwithstanding. The copyright is yours.

You can still be a starving artist with a stack of copyrights, but at least you are not a serf.

DaveW

Interesting idea on ownership of patents. I'm not sure whether the changes that DaveW proposes would increase the pool of talent or decrease it. Seems to me that no one "owns" patents. All you own are the rights that apply to the patent. And when you sign the employment papers you enter into a contractual agreement to assign these rights to your employer. Simple.

So let's say that a law is passed that makes such contractual agreements illegal. The law would have to say that a specific relationship like employment or something else must exist at the time of legally recognized disclosure. Where do you draw the line when it involves suppliers, contractors, customers, government types, patent attorneys and on and on? This is truly a swamp.

The company is going to have to have at least one employee who can initiate the process for patenting a new idea and not be the owner of the rights with some sort of contractual relationship to assign. How do you draw the line in law between people in that category and people who are not?

Corporate America would abandon the US patent office if such a system came into effect in favor of foreign patents or trade secret protection. Since the vast majority of patents that are actually developed to the point of contributing to our economy come from corporate owners the patent system in our country would likely deteriorate into small scale system for hobby inventors to gain some sort of peer recognition.

So the bottom line here is that a company patent award system really exists as a type of compensation to employees and an encouragement to get busy engineers to spend time working with the patent attorneys on the technical details and claims that greatly strengthen the coverage and therefore the value of the issued patent. If the company doesn't feel motivated to increase the strength of its patent portfolio or add to the compensation package for its more creative technical people then the situation will be like that which gave rise to DaveW's comments.

Ed Weldon

Hmmm As they say, "Assumes facts not in evidence."

"Seems to me that no one "owns" patents. All you own are the rights that apply to the patent." This seems to be a distinction without a difference. Owning the rights that apply to the <thing> in question seems a good definition of ownership.

"And when you sign the employment papers you enter into a contractual agreement to assign these rights to your employer. Simple." Simplicity is not the point. Whether this requirement stifles invention unfairly is the point under discussion. On its face, it seems to.

I did not come up with this idea that patents should be owned by the inventor that applies for the patent and is granted one. However, I put forward again the quite similar example of copyrights. There seems to be little headache or heartache on the part of industry with copyrights being owned by the composer of the work.

I see no problem with patent contracts under this system, any more than contracts involving copyrights. The scary point is that each patent would have to be valued, and the company would have to negotiate with the inventor for a license to such a patent. Again, we have copyrights as an example - book, movie, whatever. Valuing this kind of "intellectual property" is not easy, but it is familiar. The concept of royalties in both case takes care of a lot of it. The composer or inventor gets a royalty on sales. Valuable = big sales and royalties; not valuable = small sales and royalties. Again this is not at all new.

The disruptive part is that inventions would have to be valued and bought, when now they are simply appropriated without recompense. The excuse is that it would drive up the cost of the company-s products and put the company at a competitive disadvantage. No on two counts. If the invention is good, it will lead to lower costs, higher sales or both. If all companies had to buy their inventions, there would be no relative disadvantage.

"So the bottom line here is that a company patent award system really exists as a type of compensation to employees ... [for the patents the employee generates]"

In my several decades of experience with many companies in Silicon Valley, I have not seen a "patent award system" that provides any significant awards for patents created and granted, as in commensurate with the value to the company of said patents. AMD is the sole exception in my memory of a company that provided an actual, significant cash award rather a cheap wall decoration. That is the current situation. The inventor in such a situation gets nothing.

Companies know that patents are important. Start-ups and VCs know it. It is treated as tangible property in the business plan. Mature companies know it. Their legal departments sue other companies for royalties.

Mature companies also tend to be defensive. It is very common for large companies to apply for patents only to have them sit on the shelf for the life of the patent. Sequestering a patent keeps the invention off the market and potentially protects the revenue flow. Patents represent potential change and risk. In this case,, there is no social benefit to the patent. Its only use - if it is ever used - might be to extract royalties from other companies. Patent trolls are simply free market versions of this kind of thinking that use patents as weapons for royalties.

This is real and quite common. Ask around. Such patents are also not available even for license with royalties, regadless of general statements to the contrary. It is a sad exercise to try to get a license to a sequestered patent you created for some company in the past. No one will say yes. This reluctance may be pure bureaucracy in action, but the result is the same.

"If the company doesn't feel motivated to increase the strength of its patent portfolio or add to the compensation package for its more creative technical people then the situation will be like that which gave rise to DaveW's comments."

This is the actual situation of most employed engineers today. Ask around.

If you want compensation for your creativity, you have to use your inventive capability to start your own company. The final irony is that the VCs will require the same assignment of all patent rights for all employees hired by the new company. So you become one of the people you were trying to escape.

I equate the pool of talent to be just like a pool of water. You find it at the bottom!

I have never seen a pool of water form on the ceiling and I have yet to see talent at the top of the management pyramid!

A talent laden brain is heavy because it full of ideas and will thusly tend to settle in lower down. An empty brain is light and will easily float to the top!

I have worked with a number of businesses where the management was 90% of the problem and the workers were 90% of the solutions. The 10% the management got right was in the statistical probability that you cant be 100% wrong every single time. (plus that 10% of ideas were ones they were able to steal from the workers and implement successfully)