Hewlett Packard Enterprise

They pay you. That’s about it.

Also this:

You can get extra or “bonus” money added to your paycheck if you write up an idea to be patented and submit it to HPE. If they accept it for submission to the patent office, you get extra money.

The bulk of it comes only after you have helped the patent lawyers translate your submissions from engineer-speak to lawyer-speak, plus time delay. (Beware of what “may” happen during “time delay”; see warning details below).

In the USA, you need not actually build up or demonstrate your invention to file a patent. Just an idea alone (even if you never built or never even simulated it) is enough.

In other nations, you must demonstrate (build) it first.

Can you, as a non-USA HPE employee, submit a write-up from non-USA soil for HPE to file it in the USA? Good question. I do not know for sure, but I personally doubt it. Good luck with that!

Things are often counter-intuitive at HPE, not at all what they appear to be, and for sure, not what they should be. They are constantly looking for new ways to deprive HPE employees of yet another dollar! We all know about not getting paid for accumulated, unused vacation when you get laid off or are quitting. But also this: You just got promoted from chief-cook-and-bottle-washer engineer to specialist engineer? You think it’s time to celebrate? Not so fast! They give you no additional pay, then at “promotion” time, and now, since your job grade is higher, they can write harsher reviews about you! They can set you up for the next layoff, since, as a “specialist”, your output is now expected to triple! So a “promotion” may mean time to jump to another department at HPE, if you can, to get a lower job grade and lower expectations back. That, too, is risky, because many departments at HPE will be populated by workers who try to fence out the newcomer, so that “newbie” will get the management-mandated-bell-curve-required “D” or “F” grade that is required roughly one per each department and get laid off, so that the fencers-outers are left safe and dry.

Getting back to submitting patents: You may think, as some have, that since you can work tons and megatons of overtime and sacrifice your vacations, too, to do an excellent job for HPE, and still not get any raises or even have any real job security, then your extra work should go into submitting patent applications instead, and there, at least, you’re more likely to get some minimal payback. But once again, not so fast.

To play it safe, I would not recommend putting in more than one patent application at once. I had a friend who put in a “wave” of patent applications, did all the work to help the lawyers translate the documents, and then was supposedly owed a bunch of money by HPE (HP at the time). But this was a time delay till pay-off, during which they got laid off! And then blacklisted from future employment of any kind with HP/HPE, but let’s not go there… So HP got the patent rights, and this inventor never got paid!

The “HP Invent” logo, if honestly rewritten, should now read “HPE Don’t Invent Too Much at the Same Time, or HPE will Callously Lay You Off Right Before They’d Otherwise Have to Pay You”. Can HPE stoop any lower to pinch another penny away from the bottom tier, to add to the Top Executives’ Paychecks and Bonuses? I don’t know, but it looks pretty bleak.

Stop treating your employees like dirt, fifth class. If you throw enough of them away, then sooner or later, HPE will collapse. But then, you’ve already stashed all of your loot by then, yes? Well then, let’s just say, some of us have often accidentally discovered that obeying our consciences (treating others as we’d ideally like to be treated), rather than chasing money and power at all costs, has resulted in us sleeping more soundly at night and in enjoying better relationships with our fellow humans (“happiness”, basically, if you will, however “mushy” that may sound to you).

You should try it some time. You might even discover that the lowly ones 12 management levels below you, just like you, have bills to pay and have expectations of being paid what they were promised, fairly… “Fairly” in the ethical sense, not the legalistic, loop-hole-seeking sense, that is.

Do you like it when you get ripped off legally but unethically?

PS, if you really want IP (Intellectual Property) to be properly, optimally reported at HPE, you might want to consider banishing the fear that we feel, by solidly (via employment contracts) assuring us that you will not “rip us off” of our rewards for submitting IP, during the interim period between when we do all of our hard work and you laying us off… No matter how many IP disclosures we put in at the same time.

“HP Invent.” Yeah, right, Buddy!

Live up to your pretty slogans!