I recently spoke with my manager about my promotion, and was told I need to demonstrate more 'value' by filing patents. But honestly, what is the actual worth of these patents and whitepapers? It’s an open secret that people are just gaming the system with trivial filings just to climb the corporate ladder, and with AI in the mix, this flood of useless filings is only going to skyrocket. To make matters worse, it's common practice to just slap a manager's name on a bogus patent to buy favor and leverage it for a promotion. Can anyone name a single patent filed at Fidelity that has actually generated measurable business value? It feels like high-level performative work disguised as innovation. Why is management particularly in Indian corporate tech culture so obsessed with this metric?
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You must be in Wealth India .
This is rampant in NC .The entire system is a massive sham, as a majority of these patents are completely unusable by the very teams that create them
Individuals from the largest democracy have mastered this art. Bribing appears to be deeply ingrained in the culture for many. Exhibiting low levels of integrity and self-respect, they fabricate patents and involve managers to secure promotions. This quid pro quo practice requires a thorough investigation.
Thank you Fidelity, for discovering the idea of prewarming caches
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/krishnarajsooji_innovation-share-7443492559492034561-pLab
Post links to bullsh-t patents, I think there is a way to counterclaim them. Spamming USPTO is either illegal or at the least very unethical.
It's also probably being used for visa fraud
The current patent system, particularly in rapidly evolving fields like software, has devolved into a fundamentally compromised structure and a pure scam driven by legal manipulation. Rather than protecting true innovation, the patent department functions as a lucrative mechanism for attorneys to make money through strategic language manipulation. Highly skilled patent lawyers and agents use convoluted technical jargon and obscure legal English to frame common or obvious practices as novel breakthroughs, turning the application process into a linguistic game where the true merit of the invention is entirely secondary to the quality of the legal draftsmanship.
Consequently, almost all software patents are completely useless, carrying less value than toilet paper, and are rarely ever implemented or used by the teams that created them. To combat this flawed system, major companies often choose not to bother with traditional patents. Instead, companies like Google openly publish articles so that the concepts become public knowledge, effectively establishing prior art and ensuring no one else can exploit the century-old patent system to restrict or monopolize those ideas.
Furthermore, corporate patent programs are heavily gamed internally as superficial metrics for career advancement. Managers, particularly within certain organizations like ours, frequently prioritize patent filings to create artificial corporate "value" and secure promotions. This environment fosters systemic misconduct, where leaders who contribute minimally to actual deliverables improperly claim credit, while the actual technical innovators are deliberately excluded from the patent process