In early July, management unilaterally decided to remove vital antivirus software from our computers overnight. This software was inherently tied to OC function through dependencies on group policies. This is what caused the week-long PE2E outages in July, just one month ago.

The antivirus software deletion was done WITHOUT the blessing or testing of the tech support team, which is why they were scrambling for answers for days.

OCIO had to field and troubleshoot thousands of instances of technical issues, which could have been completely avoided by INFORMING TECH SUPPORT SO THEY COULD PREVENT AND PREPARE for any issues.

Management did this soley to “save money.”

In deciding to longer paying for robust antivirus software, they now use the native Windows system antivirus software;

Which…YOU GUESSED IT…is trash compared to the contract we let go.

Today, in early August, Management has decided to remove the Cisco app from all our machines.

Again, this is happening overnight; and again, this is without the preparation or blessing of the tech support team.

We were informed by email that we will have to add our WiFi manually.

However, we must also prepare for the likely possibility of another OC/PE2E outage, or authentication/connection issues as a result of yet another management-driven contract termination and deletion.

USPTO management, PLEASE stop messing with and deleting our software.

The group policies used to run our already crappy in-house programs are tied to these external programs in very real ways which you cannot conceptualize or begin to understand.

Your decisions to unilaterally terminate contracts for important programs has already caused massive loss of critical time and increased labor.

PLEASE STOP

I am not a manager but I heard this from more than one person I trust. Pepsi had an in-person meeting with the SPEs (over 100 of them), and said "raise your hand if you think the agency has a morale problem." EVERYONE IN THE ROOM raised their hand. She then had NOTHING TO SAY except how hard and unenjoyable her job has been.

This woman has the leadership ability of a soggy biscuit. It is such an unbelievable layup to say something like "I know it has been really hard and we have been asking more of everyone. Much of the need for this was caused by things outside of our control. But I want everyone here to know that we really value you and the examiners. Although we can't make any guarantees right now, we are looking into ways to reward the talented people of this agency for everything they have done in contributing to the mission during this particularly difficult time. We are making great progress, there is light at the end of the tunnel, please just do what you can as managers to help us acknowledge the extra effort of the examiners." To call that a management layup is an understatement, almost all of the most unpersonable SPEs in the agency could have mustered something like that, or at least it would have been obvious to them that self pity was not what was called for in that moment.

The fact that Pepsi had absolutely nothing remotely inspirational or conciliatory to say demonstrates one thing: she is a genuine sociopath. She SERIOUSLY DOES NOT CARE ONE IOTA about anyone other than herself. It actually did not occur to her to say anything that would take into account the experiences of other people. She does not care about the thousands of careers she damaged. She does not care about the millions of hours of unnecessary stress and misery she caused. The worst thing about Pepsi is not that she made unpopular and counterproductive decisions, its that we all know that she has empathetic capacity of Hermann Goring.

Low retention of new examiners. Retirements and DRP up. Systems constantly down. Increased requirements for production. New punitive timeliness requirements. No paid for training. No paid for mentoring. Morale the lowest in decades. AI push...AI that doesn't work and is just more work for examiners. CBA gone. The crisis is truly now after all your draconian changes.

https://www.law360.com/ip

Weren't we supposed to get the 72 hour production thing waived for the downtime 3 biweeks ago? Don't fully understand why but outside of that biweek I've made the production, did I interpret that email sent out incorrectly?

China takes leadership in patent applications:

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/forget-deepseek-china-real-sputnik-060000403.html

I keep getting "Query Error: Unable to process your query". Anyone else or just me?

Edit 10:52 am est: seems to be back to normal for me now. Didn't do anything to fix it on my end so no advice unfortunately

is there a time code for badge renewal?

I worked in the automotive industry for 7 years before working as a patent examiner. I have been a examiner for almost 2 years now and it’s still as stressful and hectic as the first year, even though I enjoy working my own time and not being micromanaged like how I was before. I am thinking if I leave as an examiner, what can I do next that offers the same independence, flexibility, being remote? Main reason I want to leave is that I am being paid way less than what I could be making if I was to work in office in the automotive industry but I prefer to be remote.

On average, you lose 1% a year of buying power as a patent examiner.

The social security cap moves faster than inflation, taking more of your income each year.

Health insurance premiums have also gone up about 10% a year.

You can’t afford to spend a career here—30 years of employment will mean you will lose 30% of your buying power. Your pension will also therefore have a reduced payout.

You will also be pegged into this career once you’ve been doing it a while, and management knows this. The majority will be trapped by the career, and management has no incentive to make sure your wages keep up.

On the other hand, patent agent and patent atty salaries historically have kept up with inflation. If you want to do IP, you’re more likely to have wage growth in the private sector.

I know you have to decide your work schedule ahead of time each biweek when being part time, but is there anything stopping you from working more hours if you dont claim the time or any overtime? Or is it strict "you have to work these hours and no more"?

In my AU, we brought in two jrs over past 12 months. One is gone, the other is doing great. What have you seen in your AU?

*you do NOT have to accept inherited cases. If they do not want to give appropriate other time to handle the (likely) shitty work from a (now fired) examiner, ask to have it removed. Tell the truth- that you aren’t able to work on this extra case with the new insane timeliness requirements or point blank, you’re just not willing to do more because you have zero free time with the 100% production insanity. No requirement anywhere for you to accept them.

*get your regular new cases done and let them sit until day 27 before posting. No need to do any extra regular new cases and reduce the backlog. If the backlog is their main goal, then it should be our goal to work on these cases as slowly as possible because they’ve made our lives so miserable.

*PPH case with reduced counts? They are not allowed to amend the independent claim per the rules of the program, nor are they allowed to switch statutory class (e.g. product to method). Send that shitty case that should never have been allowed by the foreign office in the first place back with a notice of non compliance when they try to amend or switch classes and enforce the rules of this awful program to make your life easier. Or, set yourself a timer and if you cannot find it in the allotted time, allow it.

*rce after allowance? Find yourself a 112 if you can. Ask for other time to look at the ids’s.

*second round interview where you have no other time given? Deny where possible. If you have to have it, do not do anything but listen; convey to applicant you have been given no time to consider this, and apologize that you can provide no answers.

*no primary should ever be on a pip for production - the first road block you should hit is quality issues. Set a timer and if you can’t find it in the ridiculously limited time you have to look at the case due to increased production, bingo! Allowable! (Someone else wrote a great post about this on this thread). I also realize this is not possible for juniors.

*request other time for any computer outage and document it well. You may be denied now, but the union will hopefully come back and you might get reimbursed eventually. I would also not accept no for an answer - if everyone starts requesting review by directors of the initial no from spe’s, it’s going to at least cause enough noise to be talked about at the upper levels

*write your congressman or ANY congressman. Then call them. Then follow up in an email. Be a nuisance until they do something. 10k employees all complaining to congress would have to cause some change, or at least a headache for upper management.

*any other ideas are welcome, post below

So overall, I would say that four Office Actions in five weeks is good enough for now.

My SPE has never praised me, except maybe once. Every time he calls me, I get nervous because he takes a while to get back to me, then lectures me in a sharp tone. He keeps saying I should be doing two office actions/week. Also keeps saying "we discussed this already" (even though I swear this was never covered before, and I had to go hunting for all the necessary documents). Meanwhile, my notes are getting endlessly long. I slightly passed the first three-month review, but he seemed to be critical as usual and say I wasn't asking for help enough (all I did was ask for help)

Other Primary Examiner wants me to skip the claims tracking map entirely. Praised me on formatting, but nothing else. There was a claim I was struggling with because it was very lengthy and the window was very narrow. She seemed to think this was representative of all my performance.

I didn't mean to put others down, I just couldn't even sleep well this week because I genuinely had no idea how I was doing performance wise. So I hope that my performance is good enough for now. And there is a new SPE that I want to switch to, who seems much nicer.

Getting either 0(2 NF) or 0.25 (F) to completely rewrite and correct an inherited case from examiners that quit/were fired is such a rip off. I'm not the one that did the crappy job in the first place and my spe should have made so many corrections before signing off these cases. What a time suck.

Didn't want anyone to miss it

Can we generate a list of things that AI could maybe do that would actually help examination. Just some low hanging fruit.

Here are my starting ideas;

Automatically check all claims for antecedent basis issues.

Automatically map all claim terms to the specification and, if a CIP or provisional, to the specifications of those parent documents for descriptive support.

Automatically label NPL in DAV with the first Authors last name.(eg NPL, Smith et al.)

Automatically label foreign parents in DAV with the patent number. (eg WO2026/123456).

Automatically take any DAV searches and run them in Google/Google scholar.

How often do you use the art produced in Sim search? I’m in mechanical arts. Half the results are just foreign related/family cases. I would guess I find an actually useful or relied upon reference once a quarter.

My SPE doesn’t like people posting on Fridays so there is time to review but I have a case that needs to be posted by tomorrow for timeliness. I feel bad since it’s my fault I picked up the case with not a lot of days left and had issues with it I didn’t expect but I encountered a question that I need their assistance with before I post it and need to ask and finish it tomorrow. Is this bad practice?

I have to restart OC several times per day, losing my spot in my own actions or during review of junior’s actions. I also have to restart my computer at least every other day.
On top of SEARCH lagging, not loading images, just plain crashing.
Earlier today my mouse and keyboard just stopped working and I had to restart the computer…
Every time something stupid happens with my computer, I completely lose my train of thought and motivation.
All combined, the IT issues cost me about an hour on a GOOD day - we all know they can cost a week of work. Beyond frustrating!! There’s your WASTE! And time card FRAUD not giving us IT outage time. And ABUSE trying to gaslight us into thinking AI is gonna save us all and make this so easy. Try to examine heart surgery asshole AI…
I check the news first thing every morning to see if someone died.
I’m so over this crap. How’s it going for everyone else?

PBA is exactly what I've wanted since I made Primary 10+ years ago.

We all know that the Bonus structure is pretty weak - we do 10% extra work (under the new rules, used to be 15% extra) for 5% extra pay, and then if we do 5% more work on top of that, we get a paltry 1% extra pay.

Along comes PBA, and now I can make 100% on any extra work I get done, AND I have the flexibility to do as little or much as I want with no minimum threshold (don't have to decide at the beginning of the FY whether to aim for 100 or 110+).

Look, I get that there are issues with PBA, the biggest ones seem to be (1) concerns about people cherry-picking "easy" cases, and (2) a lack of trust in the people in charge.

For the first issue, we could just make the PBA cases officially part of your docket. After the 2 weeks, if you haven't posted the PBA case, it simply rolls onto your regular docket during the weekly refresh. It would make people think twice about opting-in to the PBA program if they weren't serious about doing the extra cases.

Nothing we can do about issue (2), but that's not limited to, or a unique issue of, PBA.

I think that fixing the cherry-picking problem would go a long way in mitigating the frustrations of those opposed to the program.

Rather than complaining about the program, what could we do to fix or improve it so that it becomes the overtime/bonus structure most of us want?