r/patentexaminer

Seriously IT fuckery is probably one of the biggest drags on production and sources of examiner stress. Career upper management at the office have gone to such great lengths to avoid measuring the actual impact (hiding behind "just flex around it") that it can only be called an active cover-up at this point

If Squires wants a way to both goose morale and get insight into how things are actually running at the office, putting in a time code for IT systems downtime and making it policy that outside of extraordinary situations it gets used when certain IT systems have trouble would be an easy easy win.

You could assign certain categories for outages based on their impact. Maybe for DAV/Search/OC 25% of affected time for degraded performance, 50% time if one is down, and 100% if two are down. VPN should be 100%, as should be any workstation hardware failure.

Waiting on hold should be a separate code because nobody can focus on anything else while that godawful hold loop is playing, at least until IT can implement an automatic "call me back when I am next in the queue" feature like many customer service lines have.

My agency has been actively looking for employees opinions with workplace satisfaction and viewpoint surveys. These are emails that I know many of my colleagues just ignore at this point...because they clearly can care less about what we think or how we are.

May is Mental Health Awareness month and they have only done things to negatively impact mental health of federal employees...

So the appointees and administration heads want to know how we are doing???

Let's see... just this past year you:

1. Obliterated telework; a method of working that has proven to be mutually beneficial for both employee and employers. Data shows employees are both happier and more productive.  A win for employers.

2. Made it nearly impossible for anyone to get a good performance rating with a meaningful reward even though the people left have taken on 60% more workload in a very toxic work environment due to DOGE chainsawing.

3. Impulsively fired hundreds of people then turned around months later to ask them to come back. 

4. Began looking for people to fill positions that were occupied by qualified, experienced people with inexperienced people who will need to be trained due to the DOGE actions that saved no money.

5. Took away potential for internal employees to receive promotions by demoting backfill positions.

6. Ensured that little to no pay increases would occur for all employees.

7. Incurred more expenses for employees due to additional costs associated with RTO such as gas, parking, train, extending childcare hours, lunches, etc.

8. Following orders from people like appointee Vought who said about the federal workforce: "When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want to put them in trauma."

Here's my "anonymous" response for y'all:

FUCK OFF!!!

This is a serious agency and yet the "mascots" we're forced to look at when logging into our "advanced technology" is based off the trope of a furry and some other cartoon trademark creature that belongs in coco melon. It really is embarrassing.

Anyone else still experiencing a full outage (OC, Search tool, and DAV)?

Microsoft Word in OC is not working. Am i the only one affected?

Let’s say production is at 90% for Q3 and 100% for Q1 and Q2. What happens? Rating goes down to “marginal” but what about pay?

There’s no more bonus for DM so do we really even need to be outstanding or fully successful? We wouldn’t get fired for that, right?

After 15 years of outstanding or fully successful, I just can’t make my numbers now and with only a few biweeks left I’m not sure I’ll have enough cases on my docket to bring up my quarter in the last two biweeks. I already scheduled my work hours for the biweek and can’t really flex around computer outages more than about an hour per day. A year or two ago I was getting accolades for quality and now I’m worried about keeping my job.

Anyone else? Still today?? How can we examine efficiently when the tools cannot be used all at the same time to not function at all even with the 'handy workaround' tips? Hmmm....almost seems like they want us to fail. Or maybe it's just me that can't get things to work?

Go through the process of getting a ticket and applying for the time you were impacted. Make management allow or deny it. Management could give a blanket authorization as they have in the past, but that would require management to take accountability for their systems.

Management could have IT systems that work, but they have decided to not do that. Management has the money - biggest surplus ever yet cut the IT. Management has discretion to allow time for this and have in the past. Management is banking on you just eating the time. That would make nothing change. Management treats us like factory workers. No factory worker would flex around a line stoppage or use inferior untrained tools instead.

Management has choked out any flexibility to work on other things in a work stoppage by getting rid of training and making the docket far too small.

Nothing will change by taking all the impact of others setting up flawed faulty systems.

Long time primary here with history of high production, good DM scores, and no quality issues. I know the new timeliness system is in a "trial" this quarter, but I've tried to treat it seriously so I can make any adjustments to how I work.

My production has never been this low. I have never done so few regular new cases. Those of us who are still here previously mastered a system that many would fail at or just leave. Yet the present system is unworkable now. There's no way to come back from a missed deadline. There's no way to get ahead. Examiners in high BD arts are just screwed.

Anyone else notice a production dip? Are you doing something else to cope?

My docket is so messed up after streamline reviews slowed cases being mailed. I have an extraordinary amount of rejected cases ( 0-3 months) that will all begin to come back at the same time, exploding my amended docket. There will be very few Reg New processed with trying to keep up on the amendment explosion. I have very few amendments coming back right now, so counts are gained by processing more than average reg new further adding to the upcoming amendment explosion.

The system is down AGAIN for the 3rd time in slightly over a week. The new PAP indicia requires documentation of using SEARCH with specific searches of AI etc., yet we are expected to keep working through outages with OTHER tools (tools we've had zero training on using) OR are expected to flex around these outages with time. Kid's baseball be damned!

The insanity of these requirements has reached maximum level of shear imposssibility.

If management is going to keep going with this absolute insanity of low dockets, timeliness and higher production rates, MAYBE they should ensure that the systems they require us to use are actually usable.

Long weekend ahead..but makes sure you get your timeliness cases done before you are off for a few days. Oh wait. System is down again!, "just find a way to suck it up"!!! 😒

Hello there everyone, throwawayaccount here, I just have a few questions for those working at the USPTO. For context, I just graduated and started work on my masters program (i.g., at a T30 university in the US as Im from the Carolinas), currently I hold a undergrad degree in Library Science with a dual major in Computer Engineeing, and pursing a masters with a focus on secure programming.

For obvious reasons and not sure if USPTO managers or recruiters are on this sub, I wont give out specifics as some information I might give will be altered or fake (i.g., but the core ideas are present).

My tiger parents have been pushing for me to get a job and half assed made me apply for the USPTO; to be honest I was very suprised when I was given a job offer and was excited (i.e., patent examiner in computer engineering) as I thought the skills would be transferable or I could stay in federal employment work.

Only to realize how disappointed I was when I found the job was not in technical specifics of the patent itself (i.g., looking to make sure its not BS) but rather the law and terminology of it. My east asian parents say a "job is a job" and skills can be transferable, but is it really? I lurked on this sub and saw many examiners say if I am in this job more than 6-12 months it will be outright difficult if not impossible to find employment in Computer Science/Computer Engineering/Security Engineering ever again.

[1] How is the current state of the USPTO environment

[2] My family friend currently holds a 1b1b apartment tment near D.C. as her work as a import-export broker officer for several companies, shes offered me to stay there as she knows rent is tight but "job is a job" according to her logic.

[3] How stressful is this job for a young adult? If your not that strong in legal analysis and review and its a different fortitude from you?

[4] I know my tiger parents are saying that after a year It would be possible for me to do a lateral employment transfer to NASA, NOAA, NIST, CISA, DARPA, RAND or any other major department/firm...or is that really the case?

[5] How would you recommend a new hire to start this job or navigation of it?

[6] Is it worth to take this job?

[7] Could I make this work?

Thanks, everyone.

Is oc working? I can log into Dav and search. But I get an error message saying I don’t have access to OC.

I'm no generative AI hater, per se, so I think this could have various reasonable legit uses if proper guardrails and training are in place. But since all changes for the last two years have been implement first, think second, I was interested in opinions both inside and out on a few of starter concerns...

1 - No training or training time (yet 🙄).

2 - public trust info

3 - public transparency in it's use

4 - consistency in implementation

5 - wasted resources

One is self explanatory, it's a waste our time, for sure to get new tools, and no time to figure out if/how it's useful. We complain about that all the time.

For two, we know we should be cautious when working on any application pre PGPub since it's not public yet; don't forget we are apparently national security employees. But with production increases, morale at an all time low, stress at an all time high and like 10k examiners with no substantive compensated training, there are going to be claims and specs that are not public pasted into scout and given to these AI firms, right?

Applicants, attorneys, you cool with that?

For transparency, we'll get some half baked guidance but the MPEP isn't updated yet. For example we have MPEP 719.05 to document the search. But if we are using generative AI to get suggested searches, keywords, classifications, or whatever; I bet applicant would want to know that. Maybe the terms and classifications themselves are in the search history but it's shifting from what someone actually skilled in the art would think to search vs. what comes out of an ever evolving and never re-producable black box.

Again, applicants, attorneys, that cool?

What transparency would you like to see when generative AI is used to look for art or possibly draft rejections?

Consistency is self explanatory, but do you really expect a 20+ year primary to employ this in any way similar to a recent college grad. Naturally, inconsistency in strategies among 10k examiners is nothing new, but this seems like a different magnitude.

Last, if we're just expected to figure out what use this has through trial and error with no training, that's a lot of time, energy, money, and water just being wasted. We had an R&D unit until recently that was design for something like this. Going corps wide, right from the jump is just sloppy and wasteful.

That's a fraction of my thoughts on the issue and I'm sure examiners are too burned out to care but there you have it.

Stay strong, or at least employed

For a brief 30 minutes everything seemed to work now DAV isn't loading fml

I noticed in another thread some folks were able to claim 8 hours of other time since the entire system was down allll god damn day the other Friday.

I didnt even bother asking my SPE because in the past I've been told to just find other ways to work. When I saw others were able to, I got furious. So i'm not doing that anymore. When the system is down, I am fighting for that time back. How do we help accommodate this?

AIA went into effect over 13 years ago, yet all of our form paragraphs still use pre-aia alternatives and we include an aia status header on office actions. Yes, some pending applications qualify as pre-AIA but in the year 2026 they are quite rare.

when will the office get with the times and update our form paragraphs to get rid of the pre-AIA terms and just default to the AIA terms? in the very rare instance where pre-AIA terms should apply, an examiner can use them ….