Patent Examiners' Anxiety is the Autocrats' Weapon (Because Fear Begets Complicity)
Immediate stress relief or gratification often means docility, obedience, and irrationally submissive compliance, even obeying illegal instructions, sometimes lying to oneself to justify that retroactively. The EPO's toxic culture of fear if not paranoia can be traced back to presentations of high-level managers (scaring staff for "productivity" as if pregnancies and patent examination can be rushed or made "instant").
THE stress levels at the EPO are high [1, 2] and it impacts staff representatives as well. Many of them are patent examiners and they're pushed to grant patents that should not be granted while being denied basic facilities like a printer and a desk (it has been getting a lot harder to find or secure those).
People with a mortgage and kids can't typically just "take a break" or "walk away from it all"; that might exacerbate things, e.g. put at risk the roof over one's head, the marriage etc.
That helplessness (or sense thereof) gives EPO management a lot of control or coercive power over people's minds. But we certainly hope that EPO insiders will continue leaking information to us. The more the public knows, the greater the need becomes to tackle the issues. Seeing that the politicians are putting new curbs on patent scope, the "grant everything" attitude of Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos may be at risk. Let's hope we can similarly convince politicians to throw out allsoftware patents, which are deliberately being granted in defiance of the EPC.
Working in a job where you constantly fear managers, colleagues and clients isn't healthy. Sometimes it's better to be without that job than to be chronically unhealthy. █
"If it's a hobby for us and a job for you, then why are you doing such a shoddy job?" - Linus Torvalds