[xienze]

> the company had generated more patents than any other business in each of 25 consecutive years.

A couple things about those patents, from a former IBMer who has quite a few in his time there.

First, not all patents are created equal. Most of those IBM patents are software-related, and for pretty trivial stuff.

Second, most of those patents are generated by the rank and file employees, not research scientists. The IBM patent process is a well-oiled machine but they ain't exactly patenting transistor-level breakthroughs thousands of times a year.

[fao_]

Why do you need to generate transistor-level breakthroughs multiple times a year? Those breakthroughs are hard to generate, but they're important and industry-spanning. The problem is we've mostly stopped generating them.

[xienze]

I wasn't saying anything about that, I was just pointing out that yes, IBM produces a ton of patents, but they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses.

[swiftcoder]

> they're mostly trivial junk that regular employees generate en masse in order to earn accomplishments and make up for the insultingly low bonuses

We did that at Meta and Amazon too (for polycarbonate puzzle pieces, with no monetary award at all!). Every now and then something meaningful came out of it

[flymasterv]

I still have my “Get fucked, employee! Love, Jeff” puzzle pieces.

[NateEag]

What are these? I'm extremely curious.

[recury]

It’s a puzzle piece shape cut out of polycarbonate with some meaningless “great work!” platitude printed on it:

https://postimg.cc/v1v5VP2f

[dboreham]

Not even Lucite!

[raddan]

I also worked (briefly, as an intern) at IBM and IBM’s management also sometimes undermined the R&D that happened at the company.

I started at the tail of one research group’s mass exodus. It was like a bomb had gone off; the people left behind were trying to pick up the pieces. In essence, this group developed a sophisticated new technique, which the company urged them to commercialize. Pivoting to commercialization was a big effort, and not naturally within the expertise of this group, but they did it, largely at the expense of their own research productivity—for several years. They even hired programmers (ie, not people who are primarily computer scientists) and got it done. But just before launch, IBM pulled the plug.

This infuriated the researchers in the group. Keep in mind that career advancement in research is largely predicated on producing new research. In effect, IBM asked people to take a time out and then punished them for agreeing to do it. The whole group was extremely demoralized. Google was the largest beneficiary of this misstep.

I also had a similar, frustrating experience working for Microsoft, so it’s not just IBM, but the same dynamics were at work: bean counters asking researchers to commercialize something and then axing a project as it becomes deliverable.

If AI replaces any role in the company of the future, please let it be the managerial class.