[cuddlypsycho]

I am not suggesting that Toshiba (or other tech fossils) has the right culture when it comes to dealing with its engineering talent .. BUT .. If a company is de-risking the process of inventing/commercializing a new solution for its engineers, then they are entitled to the IP.

"A team led by Masuoka paved the way for the practical application of flash memory. The team was small when it was created in the 1980s, with an annual budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Asking for a bonus as an engineer for doing your job well is like begging for tips for waiting tables! If you don't think you are being compensated well for your skillset and you can get a better deal elsewhere then quit!

If one thinks they have a great idea that would be incredibly profitable, they should quit their job and develop it on their own dime. I have a background in micro/nanofabrication and highly doubt that Mr. Masuoka could have done what he did in his garage, without the state of the art fab technology available at Toshiba at the time.

A piece of advice to startup founders, always ALWAYS have a "propriety rights agreement" in place with whomever you work (contractors, employees, interns), detailing the ownership status of the IP created as a result of the collaboration. Without one, this could be a potential show-stopper later on when you are looking for outside investments and going through due diligence.

[adrianN]

Quitting is culturally not very well accepted in Japan. The expectation is that you work for the same company your whole career and in turn the company takes care of you.

[digi_owl]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giri_%28Japanese%29

[alkonaut]

Credit doesn’t need to be monetary. It’s the same when a team of developers develop a product that (say) wins awards and a group of managers collect the prize at a fancy gala with no developer present.

If you want more money you can just find a better offer. But some times you just want a fair share of credit.

I realize my employer might own the IP - but if I make some breakthrough making billions for my employer they could e.g give me a nice diploma in a plastic frame, or have me speak 30 minutes at an internal event about the discovery.

I think these things are often forgotten. It’s very easy for a manager to send an email saying “Bob’s new feature landed us a contract worth 10M! Great job Bob and everyone else”.

[cuddlypsycho]

> if I make some breakthrough making billions for my employer

That is a completely hypothetical situation and always never happens in the real world. Billion dollar ideas take many years to develop and many more failed attempts to successfully commercialize with lots of highly skilled individuals contributing to the project.

In a well-run company, nobody is irreplaceable. Research is always incremental with everyone adding a little bit to the work done by their predecessors. Breakthroughs do not happen in a vacuum.

As the article mentions: "But Masuoka was not around to enjoy that success. He left Toshiba in 1994, before commercial production of the chips got rolling. A decade later, Masuoka filed a lawsuit against Toshiba, demanding 1 billion yen in compensation for his work in developing flash memory."

Turns out Toshiba got along just fine after Masuka rage quit. Do you think if the technology failed (which happens all the time) Musaka would come back a decade later to ask for ¥1bn?

The only thing that is rewarded in business is RISK. The founders who quit their cushy jobs to start a company out of their garage or the early stage investor who took a chance on this untested and unproven venture and put their capital at risk are the true movers and shakers.

If you are not putting your time and capital at risk you should not expect to be making billions of $.

<Ideas are cheap .. implementation is everything>

[barrkel]

By the same logic, CEOs shouldn't be paid much, since they can't create much value themselves, they can only leverage other people's work. If they want to be paid well, they should strike out on their own and do stuff themselves.

[gaius]

The CEO, unless they are also the founder, is just an employee too. They are not a risk-taker or an innovator, they are just a manager. Everyone forgets that. Maybe they could be paid 10x as much as an entry-level employer but 100 or 500 or 1000x is insane

[lordnacho]

That's right. People also seem to come up with the point that the manager can make a huge difference to the company, but they forget that can also mean a huge negative difference. Ordinary employees tend not to be able to destroy a company on their own.

[slededit]

Wouldn't that imply you should be far more careful and selective with your choice of CEO since they can do much more damage? If anything I'd use this as an argument to pay as much as you can afford for the "best". Anything less poses significant risk of damage to the company.

[gaius]

If there’s a correlation between CEO pay and company performance it’s yet to be discovered.

[lordnacho]

Depends on how that tradeoff works. If you wanted to push up CEO salaries, certainly. But you could as well see that recruitment due diligence is of limited power.

[ckocagil]

Since you don't agree with the ethical side, think about it this way: if you're not known in the industry for paying bonuses for successful projects and inventions, why should any brilliant engineer look forward to work for you? Not to mention that there will be no motivation among your employees to perform more than the absolute minimum work required to keep their job.

Consider whether you would like to own 80% of a failing company or 30% of a widely successful one.

[cuddlypsycho]

"no motivation among your employees to perform more than the absolute minimum work required to keep their job"

There is a great body of research suggesting quite the opposite actually. Beyond a certain level of compensation, offering more money does not correlate with better productivity or creativity at all.

Those who are satisfied with doing the absolute minimum to keep a 9-5 job are not suddenly turned into great inventors if offered more money. I have often found that the most valuable engineers are their absolute worst critic when it comes to quality of work and work ethics. They would put in their absolute best even if they were doing something for free/opensource.

[barrkel]

A sense of ownership makes a material difference to me, and it must be material ownership for it to count.

Relative compensation is also important - if I'm not being paid well relative to others, that can destroy my motivation.

Great inventors won't stay at a job doing 9-5 work, of course. Treat people as levers, and good people will leave.

[mmt]

> Those who are satisfied with doing the absolute minimum to keep a 9-5 job are not suddenly turned into great inventors if offered more money.

That may be true, but that doesn't mean the converse isn't true, which is what's being alleged here, that a great inventor can be turned into an absolute-minimum employee when given insufficient reward.

More specifically, I think you're conflating the typical "inventives" that employers use (which I what I believe the studies have been about) with credit, respect, and/or an ownership stake. Even the article has a quote about it being not about the money.

> They would put in their absolute best even if they were doing something for free/opensource.

I'm speculating here, but I would expect that would change if they had to do that contribution under someone else's name, especially if that someone else were a manager and not an engineer.

[cuddlypsycho]

> A great inventor can be turned into an absolute-minimum employee when given insufficient reward

Absolutely true.

> Even the article has a quote about it being not about the money.

I don't think that is the case. "Unhappy with what he saw as Toshiba's failure to reward his work, Masuoka quit to become a professor at Tohoku University." He was very well compensated AND given full credit and even allowed to publish his work.

It was ABSOLUTELY about the money! As the article mentions: "He left Toshiba in 1994, before commercial production of the chips got rolling. A decade later, Masuoka filed a lawsuit against Toshiba, demanding 1 billion yen in compensation for his work in developing flash memory."

From a different article: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/31/toshiba_settles_wit...

"Masuoka had told the court in 2004 that he believed ¥1bn ($9.1m) was appropriate compensation for the contribution his inventions had made to Toshiba's profits"

> I would expect that would change if they had to do that contribution under someone else's name ...

Again, absolutely true. But that was not the case here at all. If anything we should recognize that Masuoka was the lead scientist for a team of engineers, that means he had a more managerial role and other junior engineers actually did the work.

I don't think we really disagree on anything. I just hate it when people take out their pitchforks and go after the "big, bad corporations" every time one of these articles hits HN :/. Japanese culture is very different than what we in the west are accustomed to and the situation is a lot more complicated than just blaming all on the evil CEOs.

[mmt]

> It was ABSOLUTELY about the money!

FTA:

  Many called Masuoka greedy at the time.

  He was unfazed by the critics. "Money is not the issue," Masuoka said. "I just want to continue with research and development. Japanese engineers must be rewarded."

It's as though you're trying to make the point that, because money is a factor, it's the (or only) factor. That doesn't jibe with the totality of the story, nor with, more importantly, the research, with which you're obviously aware, since you brought it up in the first place.

It's also pretty easy to point out a money motive in the face of a civil lawsuit, as one can't sue (directly) for respect. That he eventually settled for less than 1/10th the amount he sued for suggests (to me, anyway) that it was more a shaming/publicity exercise than a money-making one.

> If anything we should recognize that Masuoka was the lead scientist for a team of engineers, that means he had a more managerial role and other junior engineers actually did the work.

I didn't see this mentioned anywhere, especially with regard to the invention. As such, I'm not willing to make any such huge leaps of assumption.

> I just hate it when people take out their pitchforks and go after the "big, bad corporations" every time one of these articles hits HN :/.

I'm curious as to why you perceive there being some kind of mob mentality ("pitchforks") and which comments here have name-called corporations.

I find it very relevant to discuss the compensation (monetary and otherwise) of highly productive (or potentially so.. "talented") employees and how they are allocated, usually a question of where/what they choose to work on. Personally, I find it worth the occasional emotion or blame-mongering creeping in.

> Japanese culture is very different than what we in the west are accustomed to and the situation is a lot more complicated than just blaming all on the evil CEOs.

That's as may be, but also somewhat irrelevant to the discussion, since, ultimately, it doesn't matter who/what is to "blame", at least not to the engineers, not if they have a choice. Increasingly, especially with the globalized labor market, they do.

[kittiepryde]

Does research also set c-suite salaries too?

[Xylakant]

> Not to mention that there will be no motivation among your employees to perform more than the absolute minimum work required to keep their job.

If that is the reason you pay a bonus, then you already lost. People will just do the minimum required to achieve he bonus requirements and will not keep the companies interest in mind. I’ve seen places where people prioritized stuff that was no longer in the companies interest, but made them eligible for a bonus.

You could just as well fold the bonus into the fixed salary and be better off in most cases.

[tssva]

If the requirements to acheive their bonus isn't aligned with the best interests of the company that is a failure of the company and not the employee.

[Xylakant]

It’s practically impossible to guarantee the alignment unless the bonus is a flat out share of the profits or paid after an employee has performed in an extraordinary fashion without any pre-written bonus agreement. But any kind of variable payment agreement might be in perfect alignment with the companies goals at its inception by runs a substantial risk of loosing the alignment over time. Company goals change over time.

It’s totally ok if you feel like a bonus should be paid to an employee for achieving something special, but if your employees do not go beyond the bare minimum that keeps them their job, you’re in a kind of trouble that a bonus payment cannot fix.

[cuddlypsycho]

That is what we have stock options for .. to align the best (longterm) interests of the company and the employees. It is much better vehicle to build value for both parties than a bonus culture.

[mmt]

I agree that's what stock options are for, but I disagree that, in practice, they have that effect.

I think it's important to differentiate between a "meanginful" share of the company and stock options in general. For the average engineer, joining after employee #10 where founder allocated 10% to an ever-diluting option pool, that doesn't seem likely.

Perhaps public companies' profit-sharing plans are closer to the mark, except that an individual employee is so much less likely to have the power to "move the needle" on profit that even that's questionable.

[chris_wot]

Except that as an engineer, you can stick with improving or enhancing existing processes, or aim to do something utterly revolutionary. Either way, you’ll be doing your job.

Those who make a multi-billion dollar division most definitely should be very well compensated. The CEO sure is.

Without talent like Masuoka, it really wouldn’t matter that there is advanced fab technology. You need skilled and talented people to use those things in creative ways.