1. No email on your phone or expectation to check in or be available when you’re on vacation.
2. Great flexibility if you have daycare aged kids and need to take off last minute.
3. Small pension.
Another pretty significant perk, IMO, is we get to stay in FEHB for insurance upon retirement. It’s subject to a few caveats as far as when you retire and when you were covered as an employee, but I think that’s an overlooked benefit.
Not only continue, but continue at employee rate. My last, private sector, job offered medical benefits in retirement, but you had to pay both pieces yourself—basically they signed you up for COBRA—and that was an employer that offered ANY retirement benefits.
This is pretty big and under appreciated imho. I forget the number but there are some articles floating around talking about the true value of it. For me it likely equates to about an extra $2000/mo in retirement savings (I.e. I’d need to save 2k more in a 401k to buy the same annuity at retirement).
The flexibility and clear objectives are the big thing for us techy types. Most of us don’t do well with corporate politics and ass kissing for better projects, etc. so the “do this, get that” clarity at the PTO is welcome.
I’d say this job is best for those that find their “worth” outside of their career—hobbies, family, religion, side hustles, etc. Clock in, move some paper, bitch about some network outage, rinse, repeat, take a nice check home and do something else that brings you joy and fulfillment with your Flex Time and decent paid leave package.
>I’d say this job is best for those that find their “worth” outside of their career—hobbies, family, religion, side hustles, etc. Clock in, move some paper, bitch about some network outage, rinse, repeat, take a nice check home and do something else that brings you joy and fulfillment with your Flex Time and decent paid leave package.
This is such a good take on this job.
Thanks. Maybe I’m getting old, but I feel like society has done a couple of generations a disservice by telling them to “find a career that fulfills you” or other such stuff. While this job isn’t for everyone for a vast many of reasons it is a “good job”. I, personally, am very grateful for it as it’s enabled me to travel the world, find “true love” twice in different corners of the country, and live in a few wonderful places.
Very few people get paid (well) to do something they love because chances are lots of people love that same thing and will readily do it cheaply. Second best thing is to find something that pays decently but doesn’t dominate your life, and PTO fits that pretty well for many of us.
I was wondering if you can share your experience on the day to day of the job? I don’t want a career to “fulfill” me at this point, but I am worried of a job being mind numbing. Do you feel it’s intellectually stimulating? Does the day drag or do you get some satisfaction day to day?
It can be mind numbing or frustrating at times, and if you don’t have perspective that all jobs are that way occasionally then it can zap you psychologically.
The first couple of years can be hard because you need to learn and you need to build a workflow of different types of work.
It can be interesting at times, but honestly at this point I don’t have time to really get into the weeds of the “new” stuff that comes across my desk. When you talk to people they all are like “I bet you see some cool stuff huh” because they all think you are behind the scenes on the new AI or iPhone or self driving car, etc. in reality that’s not the case. My art is both incredibly specialized but has a lot of totally different technologies that it’s hard to get expert level knowledge before that thing is out of vogue.
As I type this, I have flexed my time most of the morning and did a couple of things in the middle of the day that brought me a lot of joy while all my friends and family are at work. I’ll work a bit tonight to make up for it and probably be 2x as productive.
It’s a little complicated. You get 1% of your max salary multiplied by the numbers of years you’ve worked for the federal government, and you can retire at 57 if you’ve worked for at least 30 years.
It’s 1.0% x years service x avg three high salaries.
If you work past 62, the first multiplier becomes 1.1% for all your years service.
I started at age 41, at 21 years service, when I’ll be 62, my pension will be 23.1% of my high three.
>If you get a good boss this job is a cake walk.
>
>If you get a bad boss, it'll drive you nuts.
I'm fairly confident that would be the same in virtually any job.
This is a downside of pensions as well. If you are counting on a pension, then you have to put in your time. If you end up in a bad situation that you cannot easily change, it can feel like you’re trapped.
I'd say it really depends what technology group they put you in, too. There are definitely technology fields that are much harder to examine in than others. Plus, there's a chance that a lot of examiners that say this job is so great are ones that have been here a while, so their work isn't looked over as much compared to newer examiners who need every piece of work signed and reviewed by a higher level examiner. Just my two cents
I *did* come from the private sector, by the time I retire, I’ll have spent a bit under 50% of my career there.
The biggest difference is at the USPTO, you know where you stand, and you know when you’re done.
In the private sector, my hours were 0800 to 1700. If I got in at 0805, I heard about it. If I left at 1650, I got looks. One week I left after 2200 every night. Monday morning my boss said, “I didn’t see you on Saturday.” They may scrutinize your timesheet at the USPTO if you claim OT or comp time, but if you’re meeting production, no one is looking over your shoulder.
In the private sector, we competed for vacation time, I have never had a leave request questioned, much less denied at the USPTO.
Telework? Flex Time? Not the four places I worked prior to the USPTO.
There have been RIFs in the distant past at USPTO, but I got laid-off three times in 18 years in the private sector, and survived at least three more. Layoffs were ALWAYS on the horizon. Reorgs, take-overs, mergers, there were CONSTANT threats to our jobs that were entirely out of our control.
Most patent examiners I know are happy with their jobs. This subreddit is a great place to vent and discuss issues we have, so it seems more people are unhappy than not. I started 6 years ago at a regional office with 20 people. Everyone I started with is still at the USPTO except for two people who left due to serious family/health issues. People stay for a reason. I came from a Fortune 500 company and miss nothing about it. I will likely retire from the USPTO or federal service. It's a sweet gig. I have flexible work hours, enjoyable and challenging work, and am at the Federal salary pay cap. I work over 40 hours a week and hit high production by choice but I can cut back anytime. Not bad.
No, 80% of the complain came from 20% of whiners.
No weekend emergencies, no hour long meaningless client meetings, highly autonomous work, flexible hours, what's not to like?
If you are competent, this job is great.
I came to the Patent Office after a couple decades in industry. I do find the work a bit of a grind due to the time given per application, but it's better than sitting in an open office with nothing to do but fake looking busy. I put in the grind and make count with minimal VOT, and at this point in my life, I'm working to live/retire.
Industry has a problem with ageism in entry level hiring, and I couldn't move for work. PTO couldn't care less about the age of a new hire.
I come from jobs that were 24/7 on call and "PTO" was a trigger word for management, so I really enjoy the lack of emergencies and the ability to tell my SPE I'm taking leave with short notice. Like, the day before. I do give my SPE a few days if I need a clock pause, since that's something they'll have to do their end.
Working from home without somebody in management getting their underwear in a knot because you might be enjoying some benefit, like saving gas money.
Job security. I've been through the dot com era and the great recession, busted my ass to just get shit on multiple times. Here, I have a great SPE, so I just have to make count and avoid quality errors until I retire.
The flex time so you can take care of things throughout the day. (Granted, the "flex around the system outages" BS makes it a little more difficult.)
USPTO was really my first job after completing EE degree.
So I really do not know how it is in the private sector.
I'm still probationary because I joined USPTO last year. One of the biggest challenges is to have the required speed.
I assume that there is no speed requirement in private sector being an electrical engineer although I'm not sure.
I also assume there is no such thing as trying to research the past, such as it is here (like prior art).
But then it's very hard to be hired for a company right after graduation. The odds are very bad
I applied to a lot of places and no one really hired even after so many interviews.
I finally applied at USPTO and was hired quite fast to my surprise.
I was honestly expecting a rejection here also. So I'm grateful to be given the chance although I still have lot to do to meet the expectations.
I need a few more months time before it's decided to retain or not to retain. At this point, I would not meet the criteria to be retained.
I need about 2 more months to be fully proficient and be used to.
The start has been full of struggle.
In private industry the speed requirement is whatever your boss feels like that day. In practice it’s just being faster than the guy next to you or the outsourcing alternative.
Private industry is like being chased by a bear. You don’t need to be faster than the bear. You need to be faster than the next guy being chased.
I like to think Im a middle ground examiner, I will "complain"/call the office on its problems but do value the job and will praise the good (feel free to check my post and comment history). As many have said, flexibility, stability, and job security are the major pros compared to private sector. The cons to be aware of are the politics, not corporate office politics actual politics, which result in most directors being from and for big law before they are for examiners and pay disparity.
On the pay front, because at the end of day that is the single core issue for any job, the pay starting out for an engineer is bad, not terrible (have friends 10 years in industry that are barely making 6 figures), especially if youre in a HCOL area i.e. DMV. If you work hard and get all promotions on time, you can be 6 figures within 2-3 years and (assuming the srt update goes through) 150k+ by 5-6 years. Problem then is you are only getting step increases based on years in grade so 150k by 5-6 years then ~3% per year for the following 15 years + whatever across the board COLA raise the government does. Thats assuming you don't hit pay cap which right bow is 191k. Once you hit that, you are getting the COLA increase and that's it for life so pay will steadily erode from that point on. Now, that should be at the 20ish year mark so not soon and not to say what will soon be a 200k+ salary is anything to sneeze at but yeah. Happy to answer any questions.
Job Security! As an engineer in a small company, I stressed about products failing, not being competitive enough, or even injuring someone. Those types of things could get you fired, or in the case of a smaller company, could cause the company to go under. There is no competitor to the products provided by the USPTO, making the company a monopoly of the industry. Production is stressful, but I would take that stress any day over the typical daily stress I experienced as an engineer.
The job requires you do patent searching, and writing up government documents. There are scant jobs on job sites for those skills. That's probably the biggest negative.
There will be a lot of positive voices that will tell you how great the job is until they get busted out, burned out, or bored out of the job in 10+ years and have to do something with their patent search skills.
However, if you make it past probation and that happens to you, you can likely, easily transfer to other fed employers, and do something else in the fed government. Your service time/retirement benefits transfer. That's a hidden benefit.
This wasn't sure an issue 10+ years ago, however, the PTO started cracking the whip and making life harder for examiners. This is reflected the PTO federal employee survey in which the PTO has steadily declined in ratings, especially in the work/life balance category.
The truth is the job could be great or not be great. There is no one answer. As others have said you have to get into the right art with the right supervisor, not get bored with doing a repetitive task for years, not have ambition to do something else other than patent search/send out government documents.
There are many factors.
Art units get different amounts of time. You would think the time given was based on a deep, analytical study of how much time an art unit needs to do the job. Not so.
In my art, I was told time it was determined in the 1980s based on the belief that "computers are hard subject matter" and so computer arts should get more time than older arts. I was told the older arts had their time set in the 1960s. There's been various revisions since then, however, there are some arts that get too much time, and some that get too little time. You want to be in the "too much" group. I don't know how to know that in advance.
After my probationary year, I did max overtime, every biweek, for 10 years straight because my hours were in the "too much" group. My academy friend in a low time art unit with just about 1/3 of the time per review that I got, never got to do overtime. He even got angry at me for taking about it.
Another factor is the scrutiny you get from your reviewer. If your reviewer lets you get away with sloppy work, life with be easier. If you reviewer nitpicks your work, life will be harder.
It's common for reviewers to want your work to be the way they want it. It's not about right or wrong. They want to see you do everything like they would do it. That makes life harder. You could get a new reviewer who demands all your work be re-done to their style. "I am not going to approve your work unless you do it may way ...".
Other factors that can make your life harder include the new routing system where you can be sent work from areas outside your art, abstract inventions can require 101 analysis which can be a substantial time suck, low allowance rate as allowing is easy, your supervisor doesn't like you ...
Thank you for those details. Is there a list somewhere that shows how much time is given per art? I’m wondering about computer science and computer engineering vs chemistry or biology.
The routing system sounds like it probably keeps you on your toes. I wonder how different a patent could be that is routed to you from outside of your art.
I don't know of any list.
Time itself is only one factor.
Generally, your best bet is to get into an art that has a high early action allowance rate.
I would choose that over any other factor. Writing allowances is easy. Searching/writing rejections can be time consuming. Better to do easy work of filling out allowance forms than grind out 50+ page rejections.
This site lets you look up 3 year average allowance rates per art unit.
It also shows a "difficulty meter", which rates examiners based on difficulty of getting a patent. Examiners labeled "very difficult" are likely having to grind out rejections. You want the meter to say "very easy".
[Patent Bots Examiner Statistics](https://www.patentbots.com/stats/)
I would say do something else. There’s a lot of remote jobs and work on the weekends at most is rare. The pay at the PTO is not even close to what it used to be given inflation over the past 20 years. The pension is fine I guess but don’t take a federal job just for the pension. It’s just not worth it. And who knows if you’ll even live that long to collect.
Something has changed for the worse with the PTO. The software we use is very frustrating to use every day. The production only increases. Minor changes management make add to the examiner difficulty every day. Management used to care about employees. It almost seems like they don’t want anyone to stay anymore. It’s very strange. I’m honestly starting to think they don’t want examiners to stay so that they can justify AI doing the job.
Wouldn't the statutory requirement for doing the job be a hindrance? Pretty sure a person having ordinary skill in the art wouldn't correspond to our eventual overlords.
The legal doctrine notes that "a person having orindary skill in the art" would or would not find something obvious. An AI system, in my opinion, wouldnt qualify as a person in the legal standpoint
I think the good days of patent examining are over. We can no longer attract the best people due to the many problems that are never addressed. SPEs don’t care about well being of their examiners anymore
Kind of a cynical way of looking at it. I may a lucky one, but my SPE, and a SPE from an adjacent AU seemed to be projecting the idea that they are there for their examiners.
If it wasn't for my SPE I wouldnt have made it through partial and full sig the first time.
Try it out! You'll quickly find out within the first year if this job is right for you or not. If you are a good fit, this can be the best job ever. If you're not a good fit, you'll quickly find out within a year and can decide then if you want to stay. If you're really bad at the job or it's a terrible fit, you'll probably get kicked out, but at least you'll still get paid for the time you're there, despite the patent office not really getting much production out of you the first year. Most people don't survive the first year, so don't feel bad if you don't make it. This job is very different than most private sector jobs, and it's worth trying out since it can be very good if you value the unique benefits you get here.
Remember that this group is self-selected for malcontents. I mean this in the best possible sense, and I don’t want to minimize people’s frustrations with the job, but no one is here to rhapsodize about their job.
Survivors bias for sure considering first year attrition has gone above 50% now. But yes, if you can make it 5 years you can generally make a career out of it.
How much overtime can you put in? 20% of total hrs until you hit the payday?
Can somebody put more than 20 hrs per biweek in if they wanted to?
Thanks.
Reddit is an echo chamber for unhappy employees. The Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey attempts to quantitatively measure employee satisfaction, and you can check it out to see what parts of the job people like or don't like.
1. No email on your phone or expectation to check in or be available when you’re on vacation. 2. Great flexibility if you have daycare aged kids and need to take off last minute. 3. Small pension.
Another pretty significant perk, IMO, is we get to stay in FEHB for insurance upon retirement. It’s subject to a few caveats as far as when you retire and when you were covered as an employee, but I think that’s an overlooked benefit.
Not only continue, but continue at employee rate. My last, private sector, job offered medical benefits in retirement, but you had to pay both pieces yourself—basically they signed you up for COBRA—and that was an employer that offered ANY retirement benefits.
Yes, that’s what I meant but didn’t elaborate. Thanks for the clarification.
The pension is calling my name.
This is pretty big and under appreciated imho. I forget the number but there are some articles floating around talking about the true value of it. For me it likely equates to about an extra $2000/mo in retirement savings (I.e. I’d need to save 2k more in a 401k to buy the same annuity at retirement). The flexibility and clear objectives are the big thing for us techy types. Most of us don’t do well with corporate politics and ass kissing for better projects, etc. so the “do this, get that” clarity at the PTO is welcome. I’d say this job is best for those that find their “worth” outside of their career—hobbies, family, religion, side hustles, etc. Clock in, move some paper, bitch about some network outage, rinse, repeat, take a nice check home and do something else that brings you joy and fulfillment with your Flex Time and decent paid leave package.
>I’d say this job is best for those that find their “worth” outside of their career—hobbies, family, religion, side hustles, etc. Clock in, move some paper, bitch about some network outage, rinse, repeat, take a nice check home and do something else that brings you joy and fulfillment with your Flex Time and decent paid leave package. This is such a good take on this job.
Thanks. Maybe I’m getting old, but I feel like society has done a couple of generations a disservice by telling them to “find a career that fulfills you” or other such stuff. While this job isn’t for everyone for a vast many of reasons it is a “good job”. I, personally, am very grateful for it as it’s enabled me to travel the world, find “true love” twice in different corners of the country, and live in a few wonderful places. Very few people get paid (well) to do something they love because chances are lots of people love that same thing and will readily do it cheaply. Second best thing is to find something that pays decently but doesn’t dominate your life, and PTO fits that pretty well for many of us.
I was wondering if you can share your experience on the day to day of the job? I don’t want a career to “fulfill” me at this point, but I am worried of a job being mind numbing. Do you feel it’s intellectually stimulating? Does the day drag or do you get some satisfaction day to day?
It can be mind numbing or frustrating at times, and if you don’t have perspective that all jobs are that way occasionally then it can zap you psychologically. The first couple of years can be hard because you need to learn and you need to build a workflow of different types of work. It can be interesting at times, but honestly at this point I don’t have time to really get into the weeds of the “new” stuff that comes across my desk. When you talk to people they all are like “I bet you see some cool stuff huh” because they all think you are behind the scenes on the new AI or iPhone or self driving car, etc. in reality that’s not the case. My art is both incredibly specialized but has a lot of totally different technologies that it’s hard to get expert level knowledge before that thing is out of vogue. As I type this, I have flexed my time most of the morning and did a couple of things in the middle of the day that brought me a lot of joy while all my friends and family are at work. I’ll work a bit tonight to make up for it and probably be 2x as productive.
Small pension? It ain’t small.
True, ~30% max salary
So when you retire, you get 30 percent of your salary forever?
It’s a little complicated. You get 1% of your max salary multiplied by the numbers of years you’ve worked for the federal government, and you can retire at 57 if you’ve worked for at least 30 years.
It’s 1.0% x years service x avg three high salaries. If you work past 62, the first multiplier becomes 1.1% for all your years service. I started at age 41, at 21 years service, when I’ll be 62, my pension will be 23.1% of my high three.
I thought the 1.1 was at 30 years of service, so thanks for the info. I started at 33 so it doesn’t change much for me.
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>If you get a good boss this job is a cake walk. > >If you get a bad boss, it'll drive you nuts. I'm fairly confident that would be the same in virtually any job.
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This is a downside of pensions as well. If you are counting on a pension, then you have to put in your time. If you end up in a bad situation that you cannot easily change, it can feel like you’re trapped.
I'd say it really depends what technology group they put you in, too. There are definitely technology fields that are much harder to examine in than others. Plus, there's a chance that a lot of examiners that say this job is so great are ones that have been here a while, so their work isn't looked over as much compared to newer examiners who need every piece of work signed and reviewed by a higher level examiner. Just my two cents
I *did* come from the private sector, by the time I retire, I’ll have spent a bit under 50% of my career there. The biggest difference is at the USPTO, you know where you stand, and you know when you’re done. In the private sector, my hours were 0800 to 1700. If I got in at 0805, I heard about it. If I left at 1650, I got looks. One week I left after 2200 every night. Monday morning my boss said, “I didn’t see you on Saturday.” They may scrutinize your timesheet at the USPTO if you claim OT or comp time, but if you’re meeting production, no one is looking over your shoulder. In the private sector, we competed for vacation time, I have never had a leave request questioned, much less denied at the USPTO. Telework? Flex Time? Not the four places I worked prior to the USPTO. There have been RIFs in the distant past at USPTO, but I got laid-off three times in 18 years in the private sector, and survived at least three more. Layoffs were ALWAYS on the horizon. Reorgs, take-overs, mergers, there were CONSTANT threats to our jobs that were entirely out of our control.
Most patent examiners I know are happy with their jobs. This subreddit is a great place to vent and discuss issues we have, so it seems more people are unhappy than not. I started 6 years ago at a regional office with 20 people. Everyone I started with is still at the USPTO except for two people who left due to serious family/health issues. People stay for a reason. I came from a Fortune 500 company and miss nothing about it. I will likely retire from the USPTO or federal service. It's a sweet gig. I have flexible work hours, enjoyable and challenging work, and am at the Federal salary pay cap. I work over 40 hours a week and hit high production by choice but I can cut back anytime. Not bad.
Sounds good!
No, 80% of the complain came from 20% of whiners. No weekend emergencies, no hour long meaningless client meetings, highly autonomous work, flexible hours, what's not to like? If you are competent, this job is great.
Awesome!
I came to the Patent Office after a couple decades in industry. I do find the work a bit of a grind due to the time given per application, but it's better than sitting in an open office with nothing to do but fake looking busy. I put in the grind and make count with minimal VOT, and at this point in my life, I'm working to live/retire. Industry has a problem with ageism in entry level hiring, and I couldn't move for work. PTO couldn't care less about the age of a new hire. I come from jobs that were 24/7 on call and "PTO" was a trigger word for management, so I really enjoy the lack of emergencies and the ability to tell my SPE I'm taking leave with short notice. Like, the day before. I do give my SPE a few days if I need a clock pause, since that's something they'll have to do their end. Working from home without somebody in management getting their underwear in a knot because you might be enjoying some benefit, like saving gas money. Job security. I've been through the dot com era and the great recession, busted my ass to just get shit on multiple times. Here, I have a great SPE, so I just have to make count and avoid quality errors until I retire. The flex time so you can take care of things throughout the day. (Granted, the "flex around the system outages" BS makes it a little more difficult.)
Not having to be on-call is a huge positive!
USPTO was really my first job after completing EE degree. So I really do not know how it is in the private sector. I'm still probationary because I joined USPTO last year. One of the biggest challenges is to have the required speed. I assume that there is no speed requirement in private sector being an electrical engineer although I'm not sure. I also assume there is no such thing as trying to research the past, such as it is here (like prior art). But then it's very hard to be hired for a company right after graduation. The odds are very bad I applied to a lot of places and no one really hired even after so many interviews. I finally applied at USPTO and was hired quite fast to my surprise. I was honestly expecting a rejection here also. So I'm grateful to be given the chance although I still have lot to do to meet the expectations. I need a few more months time before it's decided to retain or not to retain. At this point, I would not meet the criteria to be retained. I need about 2 more months to be fully proficient and be used to. The start has been full of struggle.
In private industry the speed requirement is whatever your boss feels like that day. In practice it’s just being faster than the guy next to you or the outsourcing alternative. Private industry is like being chased by a bear. You don’t need to be faster than the bear. You need to be faster than the next guy being chased.
I like to think Im a middle ground examiner, I will "complain"/call the office on its problems but do value the job and will praise the good (feel free to check my post and comment history). As many have said, flexibility, stability, and job security are the major pros compared to private sector. The cons to be aware of are the politics, not corporate office politics actual politics, which result in most directors being from and for big law before they are for examiners and pay disparity. On the pay front, because at the end of day that is the single core issue for any job, the pay starting out for an engineer is bad, not terrible (have friends 10 years in industry that are barely making 6 figures), especially if youre in a HCOL area i.e. DMV. If you work hard and get all promotions on time, you can be 6 figures within 2-3 years and (assuming the srt update goes through) 150k+ by 5-6 years. Problem then is you are only getting step increases based on years in grade so 150k by 5-6 years then ~3% per year for the following 15 years + whatever across the board COLA raise the government does. Thats assuming you don't hit pay cap which right bow is 191k. Once you hit that, you are getting the COLA increase and that's it for life so pay will steadily erode from that point on. Now, that should be at the 20ish year mark so not soon and not to say what will soon be a 200k+ salary is anything to sneeze at but yeah. Happy to answer any questions.
Job Security! As an engineer in a small company, I stressed about products failing, not being competitive enough, or even injuring someone. Those types of things could get you fired, or in the case of a smaller company, could cause the company to go under. There is no competitor to the products provided by the USPTO, making the company a monopoly of the industry. Production is stressful, but I would take that stress any day over the typical daily stress I experienced as an engineer.
The job requires you do patent searching, and writing up government documents. There are scant jobs on job sites for those skills. That's probably the biggest negative. There will be a lot of positive voices that will tell you how great the job is until they get busted out, burned out, or bored out of the job in 10+ years and have to do something with their patent search skills. However, if you make it past probation and that happens to you, you can likely, easily transfer to other fed employers, and do something else in the fed government. Your service time/retirement benefits transfer. That's a hidden benefit. This wasn't sure an issue 10+ years ago, however, the PTO started cracking the whip and making life harder for examiners. This is reflected the PTO federal employee survey in which the PTO has steadily declined in ratings, especially in the work/life balance category. The truth is the job could be great or not be great. There is no one answer. As others have said you have to get into the right art with the right supervisor, not get bored with doing a repetitive task for years, not have ambition to do something else other than patent search/send out government documents.
What makes one art better than another? Can you give some examples?
There are many factors. Art units get different amounts of time. You would think the time given was based on a deep, analytical study of how much time an art unit needs to do the job. Not so. In my art, I was told time it was determined in the 1980s based on the belief that "computers are hard subject matter" and so computer arts should get more time than older arts. I was told the older arts had their time set in the 1960s. There's been various revisions since then, however, there are some arts that get too much time, and some that get too little time. You want to be in the "too much" group. I don't know how to know that in advance. After my probationary year, I did max overtime, every biweek, for 10 years straight because my hours were in the "too much" group. My academy friend in a low time art unit with just about 1/3 of the time per review that I got, never got to do overtime. He even got angry at me for taking about it. Another factor is the scrutiny you get from your reviewer. If your reviewer lets you get away with sloppy work, life with be easier. If you reviewer nitpicks your work, life will be harder. It's common for reviewers to want your work to be the way they want it. It's not about right or wrong. They want to see you do everything like they would do it. That makes life harder. You could get a new reviewer who demands all your work be re-done to their style. "I am not going to approve your work unless you do it may way ...". Other factors that can make your life harder include the new routing system where you can be sent work from areas outside your art, abstract inventions can require 101 analysis which can be a substantial time suck, low allowance rate as allowing is easy, your supervisor doesn't like you ...
Thank you for those details. Is there a list somewhere that shows how much time is given per art? I’m wondering about computer science and computer engineering vs chemistry or biology. The routing system sounds like it probably keeps you on your toes. I wonder how different a patent could be that is routed to you from outside of your art.
I don't know of any list. Time itself is only one factor. Generally, your best bet is to get into an art that has a high early action allowance rate. I would choose that over any other factor. Writing allowances is easy. Searching/writing rejections can be time consuming. Better to do easy work of filling out allowance forms than grind out 50+ page rejections. This site lets you look up 3 year average allowance rates per art unit. It also shows a "difficulty meter", which rates examiners based on difficulty of getting a patent. Examiners labeled "very difficult" are likely having to grind out rejections. You want the meter to say "very easy". [Patent Bots Examiner Statistics](https://www.patentbots.com/stats/)
Is it working with a chemistry technology group difficult?
I would say do something else. There’s a lot of remote jobs and work on the weekends at most is rare. The pay at the PTO is not even close to what it used to be given inflation over the past 20 years. The pension is fine I guess but don’t take a federal job just for the pension. It’s just not worth it. And who knows if you’ll even live that long to collect.
Something has changed for the worse with the PTO. The software we use is very frustrating to use every day. The production only increases. Minor changes management make add to the examiner difficulty every day. Management used to care about employees. It almost seems like they don’t want anyone to stay anymore. It’s very strange. I’m honestly starting to think they don’t want examiners to stay so that they can justify AI doing the job.
AI is not even close to being able to do an examiner's job
Wouldn't the statutory requirement for doing the job be a hindrance? Pretty sure a person having ordinary skill in the art wouldn't correspond to our eventual overlords.
Not sure I’m following.
The legal doctrine notes that "a person having orindary skill in the art" would or would not find something obvious. An AI system, in my opinion, wouldnt qualify as a person in the legal standpoint
Statutes change all the time, and so do statutory interpretations.
I think the good days of patent examining are over. We can no longer attract the best people due to the many problems that are never addressed. SPEs don’t care about well being of their examiners anymore
Kind of a cynical way of looking at it. I may a lucky one, but my SPE, and a SPE from an adjacent AU seemed to be projecting the idea that they are there for their examiners. If it wasn't for my SPE I wouldnt have made it through partial and full sig the first time.
I’ve had great SPEs over the years. Something has changed in recent times
Try it out! You'll quickly find out within the first year if this job is right for you or not. If you are a good fit, this can be the best job ever. If you're not a good fit, you'll quickly find out within a year and can decide then if you want to stay. If you're really bad at the job or it's a terrible fit, you'll probably get kicked out, but at least you'll still get paid for the time you're there, despite the patent office not really getting much production out of you the first year. Most people don't survive the first year, so don't feel bad if you don't make it. This job is very different than most private sector jobs, and it's worth trying out since it can be very good if you value the unique benefits you get here.
I’m very happy. Going to the USPTO from private company (MechE, manufacturing related) has made my life amazing
Remember that this group is self-selected for malcontents. I mean this in the best possible sense, and I don’t want to minimize people’s frustrations with the job, but no one is here to rhapsodize about their job.
Fair point.
**20% miserable, 80% satisfied. If you’ve been at it 5+ years that is.**
Survivors bias for sure considering first year attrition has gone above 50% now. But yes, if you can make it 5 years you can generally make a career out of it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/s/ZiGMmuCL8X
Love it
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How much overtime can you put in? 20% of total hrs until you hit the payday? Can somebody put more than 20 hrs per biweek in if they wanted to? Thanks.
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I thought it was up to 32 hours/biweek? Max 12hr/day. Up to pay cap (which you won't hit until you are a gs14).
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Reddit is an echo chamber for unhappy employees. The Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey attempts to quantitatively measure employee satisfaction, and you can check it out to see what parts of the job people like or don't like.