r/todayilearned • u/EtOHMartini • 27d ago

TIL that philanthropist and engineer Avery Fisher was motivated to start his own company after, identifying a way to save his employer $10,000 a year, was immediately denied a $5/week raise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avery_Fisher
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u/Mazon_Del 27d ago

At Raytheon when I worked there we had a policy that if you had an idea for a technology, the company would help you spend your unpaid time working on it and would only charge you the bare minimum for resources from their stockpiles, help you file for patents (which they got, not you), and for a technology you invented that got them a billion dollar contract, the following breakdown is your reward.

  • $1,000 for getting a patent.
  • $2,000 for the patent becoming monetized.
  • A plaque commemorating this accomplishment.
  • A steak dinner where they present you (and everyone else who earned one) the plaque.

Had two ideas during my time there that got people super excited, started looking into the whole process and realized that I'd have to pay everything myself, I'd spend hundreds of hours of unpaid time, and I'd at best only get a measly $3,000 for my work (which likely wouldn't cover my costs) while the company stood to make obscene amounts of wealth from it?

Yeah no. I immediately stopped.

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u/tinkeringidiot 26d ago

I have a patent under that system, finally awarded last year. I got $2,000 for the initial filing and nothing else because in the four years it took for the patent to be awarded I found another company to work for. They did at least cover my time to develop the idea because I got IRAD funding for it.

They didn't even tell me when it was awarded, even though my name is on it. I found out from a junk mailer from a plaque-making company (that, yes, I did buy a plaque from - they earned it).

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u/Mazon_Del 26d ago

They did at least cover my time to develop the idea because I got IRAD funding for it.

Ahh that's good. At the time I was speaking with their people on this, they were happy to tell me about all these resources they had to help me get such things, but had made it pretty clear that doing such activities was very much "on my time" not the companies.

Then again, company policies were always pretty much more like guidelines than rules. For example, I wanted to get a masters degree in a technical field, but despite the company policy basically saying "If you can make an argument that this will help the company, it's authorized." my department manager was only authorizing degrees for a VERY specific degree which functionally was nontransferable to outside companies because nobody else did the relevant work. I poked HR and they basically said "Nothing we can do, sorry.".

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u/tinkeringidiot 26d ago

I poked HR and they basically said "Nothing we can do, sorry.".

Sounds like you got a good lessons in that HR doesn't stand for "Resources for Humans". It stands for "Humans as Resources". You never need to actually ask HR anything, you can feel free to assume their answer is whatever is worst for you and be 99.999% right in that assumption. And not just at that company, that's the general rule for everywhere - HR doesn't exist to help you, it exists the keep the company from getting sued by you.

my department manager was only authorizing degrees for a VERY specific degree

Yeah unfortunately they have that power, even though the funds don't come from their budgets. I was fortunate enough to have managers that understood that I wouldn't be working for them forever and who were more than happy to sign off on spending corporate's money.