Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

Regina Dugan is a former head of DARPA as well as ATAP. She has an impressive resume. Why would she do something like this? For a not particularly important patent, LED popup books? It seems bizarre.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regina_E._Dugan

They thought they could get away with it.

Someone needs to add this incident to her Wikipedia page.

>> She has an impressive resume.

>> Why would she do something like $badthing?

Am I the only one wondering why anyone would think a person's resume should be any kind of predictor of good or bad behaviour?

You're not the only one wondering that.

In fact, one way to get an impressive resume is to railroad others and use people as stepping stones to your way to the top.

Not saying it's not Wikipedia material, but perhaps a site nice and searchable site of misdeeds so we won't forget? Does something like this already exist?

Thomas Edison had a great resume.

Julian Assange did culture shifting work with Wikileaks, but allegedly sexually assaulted 2 women.

Adrian Peterson is possibly the best running back to ever play in the NFL, but has recently admitted that he still beats his children.

Steve Jobs created products that advanced how we use technology in our every day lives by leaps and bounds, but by all accounts was cruel to his daughter.

People can achieve amazing, important things in their professional life, but it's no indication that they're good people.

But this is not a matter of personal vs professional life. What she did was on a professional capacity. Not really comparable to all the examples you gave.

He also ‘railroad others and use people as stepping stones to your way to the top‘ so that’s not a counter argument.

I think the argument was that he did precisely that. Yet history paints him as a great inventor (he was, and filed a lot of patents), and most people likely think of him as a "good/nice guy" which he may or may not have been.

People don't get to the top by being ethical. They get to the top of the org chart by playing politics. Many of them are practically psychopaths.

Also, you don’t get to be the head of an organization whose primary goal is to figure out better and more efficient ways of mass murdering people whilst having any semblance of a moral compass, either.

Yea, I realized that might be the case after posting. But, it’s an ambiguous statement in context.

He’s not making a counter argument. He’s agreeing with you...

Agreed. If you’re an asshole let’s make sure some shit you do sticks to your name.

Probably because she’s been doing it to lots of people for her whole career. People don’t usually get caught the first time they shoplift.

> She has an impressive resume.

> Why would she do something like this?

Because the latter may be the reason for the former

The good news is that very few people are at the top. Most are in the middle, and it's entirely possible to be ethical and in a good middling position.

Thomas Edison is notorious for doing this, so it isn’t that ambiguous.

On one hand I’ve long thought this would be a good thing to have after seeing how often people can prey on others repeatedly but on the other I’ve realized that some people can and do change. The fuzziness of our memories over time let’s us heal and gives others a second chance. I’ve also learned over the years that things that are designed to catch or punish bad actors will instead be used by the very people they’re meant to punish to go after their enemies. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

How can you justify your work in the middle as ethical, if it directly supports a rotten apple at the top? Your life's work turned into a support system for a beast, wonderful!

I assume that statement has less to do with good behavior and more to do with doing something that can bite you in the ass when you have so much to lose.

The psychopaths at the top are a lucky minority of a mass of psychopaths, most of which prosper a bit less at middle levels in organizations. Only low-functioning psychopaths are exposed and thrown out, and usually only by chance because of specific incidents.

Have had that idea when I was younger. I no longer support this idea, because I realize that nobody else wants that site to exist.

The same Wikipedia article that mentions a Wired article of potential conflict of interest when working for the US goverment and awarding a contract for a company she owned stock in. Totally sounds like a non-corrupt human.

Inside most companies there is pressure to get a few patents.

At promotion time, people will ask 'if you've been researching $thing for 3 months, why haven't you patented anything yet?'.

It does increasingly feel this way, but I think (hope?) it's selection bias. In other words we hear about the psychopaths because they are newsworthy. We don't generally hear about the average CEO, because they are average and generally follow expected social norms.

At least, that's what I hope.

Since it is original research it will get thrown out in a minute.

Hi, hello, I'm a person who didn't know, so the clarification was valuable to me.

Reminds me that anecdote, not sure who it was, he was wondering where are the Caesars or the Hitlers of our time, all that brand of ambitious, manipulative and dominant personalities. The answer, he found, was that nowadays those people are absorbed into corporate instead of going into politics.

To be fair we can't be sure that she was personally involved or had knowledge of the patent application.

Sorry but I don't share that hope, it doesn't make logical sense. The higher you go in organizational pyramid, and the bigger the pyramid is (in width and amount of levels), the harder it gets to progress. Sure, you can impress here and there with your raw technical/managerial skills, but sooner or later that won't get you much further. That's where backstabbing, alliances, quid pro quo, slanders happen. It comes about how you look to those important, not actual results. Good hearted balanced individual could theoretically survive, but constant battle with those skilled in these games would wear them down over time.

Politics on the other hand works almost always, the person just needs to be apprehensive and adapt to whom they try to please. Its not limited to corporations, plain old state politics and bureaucracy is the same.

Btw minor nitpick - I would expect much more sociopaths than proper psychopaths in top of the pyramid.

Are you making reference to this? https://goo.gl/images/2UmYrg

Minor nitpick with your nitpick - the DSM used to make a distinction between Sociopathy and Psychopathy, but as of DSM 5, they are both described under the umbrella of Antisocial Personality Disorders (ASPD). The distinctions now are only cultural, and made outside the DSM - usually by researchers trying to explain ASPD traits in nature vs. nurture constructs. In that regard, one could say there's actually no distinction between the traits describing the two as defined in DSM 5.

> She has an impressive resume.

Does she? Or does she just have an impressive patent portfolio cribbed from others' work?

Or, in fairness, did this not happen as told because there's another side to the story?

That's hilarious. 3 months is far too short of a time to actually invent anything meaningful and get far enough along with it to determine whether it would actually be worth patenting.

As a result of many real world experiences I've started to see ridiculously impressive looking resumes as a contrarian indicator.

When I see a resume that cites multiple company foundings, dozens of patents, dozens of projects, etc. I know the person is either stealing or taking credit for others work or just padding their resume in the more conventional sense. It says this person is a liar, exaggerator, narcissist, or sociopath.

It's simply not physically possible for a human being to do the amount of stuff I see on some resumes/CVs. There are not enough hours in a day to actually invent (as in actually conceptualize, research, and prove) a hundred things in 20 years or found (as in actually shepherd to success) dozens of companies. Founding one successful company takes several years and a ridiculous amount of work. Founding two or three in a life time is possible but off the charts impressive and the number of people who can realistically claim this are few. Dozens? Physically impossible, but I've seen such things claimed... by people whom I later saw were total liars and sociopaths.

Edit: it's different if they accurately claim to have managed people who have done these things, like "managed a research organization with over 200 patents and 1000 publications" or "founded company X and also contributed as an advisor to companies Y and Z" etc. It's also important to note authorship positions in long lists of publications since some science teams add everyone who ever touched a project as an author. Being listed on a bunch of publications with 15 authors is not a contrarian indicator, but claiming to be a primary researcher on absurd numbers of things can be.

Disclaimer: I am a Google employee, who isn't listed as inventor on any patents here. I don't speak for Google and all the usual blah blah.

In my experience outside of Google, typically how this works is that you will get a visit from product counsel asking if you have any patent-able work. It's not your job to ask if it's novel enough; that's the patent lawyers job.

So they bug you for months while you are trying to get work done asking about what you are working on and how it works, and then file something on your behalf. I can't recall if I even needed to sign anything before a provisional application was filed.

The way that this is pitched is that it's a necessary evil. One needs a huge patent portfolio to protect your tech inventions, because when you are sued, you can leverage your portfolio to protect yourself. I hate this system and how it works, but it is a business reality.

I don't know Regina, but I think Hanlon's razor applies. It less likely that she woke up one day and said, "well, I want to steal other people's inventions today!", than, "oh I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back."

It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.

>It doesn't make what happened here right, but I think it's unfair to assume malice.

I'll probably burn some Hacker News points here but the old adage needs to be updated. Never attribute to stupidity or malice what can be attributed to both stupidity and malice.

No reason to take what is not yours, there is no room here to justify such even if the system is broken.

For others, just about every bio of Nikola Tesla describes how poorly he was treated by Edison. Interesting reading.

“It’s a necessary evil”

Company motto: “Don’t be evil”

Do you notice the hypocrisy here?

My experience with patents extends beyond Google. I've never heard "It's a necessary evil" uttered anywhere here.

Aside from that, I'm not saying that there's not hypocrisy but I am saying that the real story is often more nuanced than first appearances.

>"I have a bunch of work to do and need to get counsel off my back"

You would have had a hell of a lot more work to do if you'd actually come up with the ideas you patented yourself, instead of stealing somebody else's bunch of work they did.

"Don't JUST be evil. Be evil AND greedy."

Electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant, says a lot more about you as a human being than the person you're trying to discredit by electrocuting dogs, cats, horses, and even an elephant.

https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/10/19/edison-publicly-torture...

https://www.wired.com/2008/01/dayintech-0104/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrocuting_an_Elephant

NSFL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlPYikt_qvo

I don't disagree with the larger point but:

"The war of the currents (sometimes called battle of the currents) was a series of events surrounding the introduction of competing electric power transmission systems in the late 1880s and early 1890s." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents

Electrocuting an Elephant seems to have occurred a decade after the war of currents January 17, 1903.

So he had even less justification for electrocuting the elephant than trying to discredit Tesla, and he was even older and should have known better. That makes him an even worse human being in my book. Don't fuck with elephants!

Well said! The old adage; "if something seems too good to be true; it probably is" is a truism. The outliers are very few. The Internet is used to amplify every small exaggeration and falsehood into banner headlines and for some reason even sane people default to believing them. Being sceptical takes effort while belief is wired into our DNA.

Edison was not responsible for Topsy's death. That is a myth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)#Association_w...

http://edison.rutgers.edu/topsy.htm

I suppose it depends how you view the system and the rotten apple.

A properly functioning complex system should be able to tolerate a few bad apples, limiting the harm that they can cause. If you work in such a system and there are bad apples, you can justify the ethics of your work if there are checks and balances that limit the leader's ability to harm.

The obvious analogy is the current U.S. political system. It's quite possible to see the United States as generally striving for a more fair society, and generally good, and yet to be disgusted by Trump's cruelty and inept. The only way to square those two competing ideas is to acknowledge that even though Trump is a miserable rotten apple, he doesn't really have all the power. As bad as he is, he won't last forever, and the principals of the U.S. will long survive him.

No way. The psychopaths at the top of the top are a different breed, by an order of magnitude. It takes a different "type" of person to run for U.S. President than to run a large organization or company. Consider the president of GM, who worked her way up over 30 years from bottom to top and had to learn everything in between. Compare that to either Trump, who basically staged his election as reality TV episode that went wrong (he just wanted ratings, not to run the place). Also consider Obama, who was so smart, well spoken, and charismatic, probably only heard people telling him would be president from 18 onwards. Also Ted Cruz, who would happily accept a role of enforcement of the "US Moral Compass" as his pre-ordained right/duty.

My point is that there are plenty of folks at the top of their company that are not physcopaths, they inched their way up over decades of sweat and tears, and even if they aspired to lead on their way up, they knew they had to prove themselves in every aspect of the business first. CEOs of GM and Merck are decent examples. Then there are folks who believe they were chosen for the job before their birth. I'm scared of them.

Citing the inevitable tech-press coverage now that the blog-post has hit HN's front page should get around that nicely.