Bonum Certa Men Certa

The EPO's 'IT' Systems Have Become a ClusterZuck, Based on EPO Insiders

Facebook Meta Announcement: Please like!
When a patent office becomes all about nepotism and politics, at the expense of science and technology



Summary: The comical state of EPO "IT" is explained in a cynical communication entitled "The Joys of Technology"

THE EPO has long had "IT" issues. Benoît Battistelli already chucked literally hundreds of millions of euros down the bin with his utterly awful "IT" systems. It was so bad that António Campinos appointees had to bury the whole thing and earlier this year they illegally outsourced their systems to Microsoft. Even the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which is American, did not go that far, except for document formats.



"The EPO rapidly loses control of its own systems!"Circulating among EPO staff at the moment is a document about the latest "epic fail" at the Office. Does the Office management ever care to understand Quality Control? No, to them (the 'suits'), "Quality" just means speed; in other words, hurry up already!

The Central Staff Committee (CSC) asks: "Are you also participating in the weekly “noreply_bit Bingo”? Wondering how many of these frequent mass emails will be crying for your attention this week again? We feel sorry for our BIT colleagues who see themselves forced to make the impossible possible, scrambling to keep our services up and running. They deserve our support and understanding. At the same time, we suggest that everyone keeps a record of these many interruptions, as they inevitably impact on your production."

We know how "production" gets measured; the management calls the grant of many software patents "production" and EPO examiners are compelled to play along (or get sacked for low "production"). Likewise, their "BIT" colleagues are made to work with unsuitable infrastructure, some of which has been outsourced to profoundly incompetent companies. The EPO rapidly loses control of its own systems! This should never be happening!

Anyway, reproduced below is the 2-page publication from the CSC

Munich,16/12/2021 sc21150cp

The Joys of Technology

Weekly noreply_bit Bingo

Dear Colleagues,

Are you also participating in the weekly “noreply_bit Bingo”? Wondering how many different incident / issue / release notice / software update / ... you will be receiving this week again? Wondering how often you will ‘kindly’ be told to restart your computer, to wait for the VPN connection to be available again, to be ‘thanked for your understanding’ while some essential tools are offline or otherwise dreadfully slow?

Wondering which new tools, e-learning modules, PGP digital process update, intranet links, video messages, newsletters... will be crying for your attention this week?

The pattern is all too frequent and recurring and we feel sorry for our BIT colleagues who are tasked time and again to jump through hoops while scrambling to resume normal service. BIT staff make the impossible possible and they deserve our support and understanding.

Computer and connectivity problems are a fact of life. There is no avoiding the fact that technology will fail from time to time and that updates and restarts will be necessary – yet the staff of our ‘model international organisation’, ‘at the forefront of technology’ seem to have to endure more than their fair share of IT issues in these distributed times.

The Office proudly proclaims that it works for a “Minimum Viable Product” – yet seems to forget that staff then needs to do actual work with this “Minimum Viable Product” – a tool which often turns out to be overly cumbersome to work with, buggy or incomplete, and will have to undergo several updates before it can be called anywhere near a final, working product. Agile development may sound very cool – unfortunately it means the user will get a rough first draft to plod through. It compromises the quality of our data with numerous time-consuming changes and updates requiring retroactive corrections as the versions evolve. And with each such “agile minimum viable product” productivity gains are heralded as if it were the best thing since sliced bread.

The tools we get should be there to enable or help us to do our work – all too often they seem more likely to hold people back.

The BIT administration seems to have launched their staff into a sprint – but they forgot to check if their development teams were able to walk stably first. The weekly “noreply_bit Bingo” nicely illustrates this conundrum, and one can only wonder which hefty budgets are necessary to fuel these efforts.

There appears to be a fundamental mismatch between the goals given to BIT staff and the needs of the Office: BIT staff seem to have to provide new tools, releases, and updates at an unprecedented pace in more than 40 years of history of the Office. On the one hand this puts them under undue pressure: for instance they are not even able to maintain the habitual change freeze for the month of December.

On the other hand, the continuous issuing of new tools and releases - most of them turning out to be beta versions - ends up in slowing staff down in a continuous effort of adaptation and learning, rather than helping staff in achieving their challenging targets. This is not working smart.

Staff Representation, which has always advocated a smart way of working for EPO staff, calls on the administration to reconsider this ill-conceived and counter-productive policy of pushing BIT to issue new products and releases at a pace which is unnatural and unsustainable for staff in all DG’s and BIT alike.

Even if we all work in a bean-counting system where every tap on the keyboard is timed and monitored, and tallied up in a huge, big ranking excel sheet to decide who gets the box of chocolates at the end of the year, our ‘model international organisation’ has forgotten to include the result of the weekly “noreply_bit Bingo” in their bean-counting system. The time lost here is simply not accounted for. This, we can compensate for during evenings and weekends. Could this be the reason why core hours and flexitime are about to be chopped?

One thing we can be sure of: the weekly “noreply_bit Bingo” keeps our mailboxes full and gives ample evidence that our mail servers are quite capable of handling frequent mass emails.

In the meantime, make sure to keep a record of the time lost due to all of these outages, to the e-learning modules, due to scouting around the intranet trying to find the updated “How-To” guides. Keep track of each entry on your “noreply_bit Bingo” sheet. It may come in handy for the inevitable “gap analysis” during the appraisal cycle: we are not so sure yet how the new coveted “holistic approach” will cater for this.

The Central Staff Committee


Since they're mentioned “gap analysis”, how can we forget the "gap"...?

Video download link | md5sum daa6c4b14f45f1292dcf04348028c109

Recent Techrights' Posts

[Meme] Being High on Drugs Isn't Happiness (Likewise, Being a "Star" in Social Control Media is Temporary)
Many entities - or people - will regret telling everybody "follow me on Twitter"
 
Links 12/01/2025: Microsoft Admits It's Laying Off Staff Only Where Staff is "Expensive" (Race to the Bottom)
Links for the day
[Meme] They Say That RMS Says the "F" Word (Freedom) Too Much...
About 32.7k US dollars are now left for the FSF to raise (in 6 days)
Slopwatch: Brittany Day and Brian Fagioli Are Still at It, Googlebombing "Linux" With LLM Slop (Taking Away Traffic From the Articles They're Plagiarising)
Some more sites that used to cover GNU/Linux have turned into slopfarms
Links 12/01/2025: More Sanctions Against Russia, SCOTUS Signals Fentanylware (TikTok) Ban Will Stay
Links for the day
[Meme] A Jihad Against Servers the User Controls
We need to strive for and work towards greater control by users over "their" servers
Microsoft Azure-Only Bugs in "Linux" Can "Compromise the System."
From ubuntu.com and linux.org a few days ago
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, January 11, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, January 11, 2025
Gemini Links 12/01/2025: DHL Express Does Not Deliver, Oddmuse Update
Links for the day
Links 11/01/2025: Social Control Media Facing Sanctions, Carter Respected at Funeral
Links for the day
If TikTok (China) Has the Rights of American Persons, Then ByteDance Can be Sentenced to Death
TikTok - like Julian Assange - does not enjoy any protections of the First Amendment and since it's not a person it would lack these protections as an American company, too
After a Year of Layoffs in Microsoft Nigeria (and Microsoft in Africa at Large) Windows Falls to New Lows and Bing Falls to 0.46% "Market Share"
Of course Microsoft gave bribes in Nigeria to suppress GNU/Linux adoption
An Important Lesson About Patents and Patent Maximalism (They Drive People and Companies Away)
This previously happened in Texas, where companies perceived their presence (in any form) to be a liability as patent trolls could drag them to friendly courts and win "damages"
When It Comes to Fentanylware (TikTok), a Digital Weapon of a Hostile Entity, Common Dreams is Jumping the Shark Again (Years After It Ran Out of Steam or Money)
Or maybe it likes the agenda promoted (curated) by Fentanylware (TikTok) and its parent company, Bytedance or Chinese Community Party (CPP)
BetaNews is Now Officially a Spamfarm With Phantom Authors and Fake Text (SPAM and Linkspam Made With LLM Slop)
That's it, the site is virtually dead now (maybe that was the plan all along)
Hazem Abbas of medevel is Ruining His Site With LLM Slop
Some of his articles are original, but now everything is suspect
[Meme] Real and Fake (or "several influential "open source" organizations [which] have come to be dominated by large companies")
The Free Software Foundation has not sold out
Free Software Foundation: Anchoring the FSF in its values
Original by Free Software Foundation
GNU/Linux Surges to All-Time Highs in Greenland, Windows Sinks to All-Time Lows
a lot of GNU/Linux gets detected there lately
Microsoft's "Donald Trump First" Doctrine
national deficits growing
Microsoft in Trouble as Azure Breaks and Only Days After Promising Investment in "Datacentres" Construction of Actual Datacentres Paused (Expect More Azure Layoffs Very Soon)
No wonder many people who got trapped inside Azure quit Azure, which keeps bleeding (losses and layoffs)
Gemini Links 11/01/2025: Wildfire, Militia and the Mole, IRC vs Social Control Media
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 10, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, January 10, 2025
Links 10/01/2025: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Shrinking, "Not every user owns an iPhone"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 10/01/2025: Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Linux Desktop Setup
Links for the day
[Meme] Donald Trump Will Pay Microsoft Back
bribery administration is 10 days away
statCounter Sees GNU/Linux Tripling in Share in 3 Years in Iran
ChromeOS adoption is low, but then again, nobody buys a Chromebooks with the expectation of better privacy
Using a Popular Ponzi Scheme to Sell Expensive Hardware Mislabelled as "Hey Hi" (AI)
Selling shovels in an age of "gold rush"
Search Engine-Optimised (SEO) Googlebombs Target "Linux", "Ubuntu", and "RISC-V", Still Composed by Bots
the way to defeat LLM slop (trash) is to call out serial sloppers or "repeat plagiarists"
Guardian Digital, Inc (linuxsecurity.com) is Again Spamming or Googlebombing "Linux" and "Security" Using LLM Slop
Guardian Digital is basically a dodgy company. Don't trust Guardian Digital with your security.
Unix Men (or UnixMen) Has Turned Into LLM Slop With Embedded Linkspam, Piggybacking "Linux" for SEO
Welcome to 2025 and the "new" Web
Computers as a Heat Source
suppose you have over a dozen activated monitors in a room or two
Social Control Media and 'Linux' Foundation Accelerate the Death of the Web
Social Control Media is basically a dying business
Links 10/01/2025: Disinformation Sold as "Artificial Intelligence (AI)" and as "Social Media" Now Facing Growing Scrutiny
Links for the day
Linux Foundation Increasingly Reliant on Paid Press Releases, Paid-for Stenography, and Even LLM Slop (Fake 'Articles')
This LLM slop is a big problem both for Linux and for Google
Links 10/01/2025: Scam Altman’s Younger Sister Files Lawsuit Claiming He Sexually Abused Her, Apple Faces Embargo
Links for the day
Gemini Links 10/01/2025: Internet Archive Gopher Search Interface and Falling "in Love With the Small Web"
Links for the day
Starting 2025 on a Strong Note
we ought to find more time to produce our own stories
Entire News Sites Have Become Just the Output of Bots (or Chatbots Disguised as "Authors")
the Web is screwed
Colombian Trends Help Explain Why Microsoft Rushes to Start the Year With Mass Layoffs (Before Some Staff is Even Back to Work!)
No wonder there are mass layoffs (first of GAFAM) as early as week 1 of 2025
LLM Slop and Bot-Generated Marketing for the Linux Foundation and Its Openwashing
Of course it's chaff
Microsoft Gives Money to Trump, Poor or Even Sluggish Adoption of "Hey Hi" (AI) Reported Amid Mass Layoffs
Microsoft now uses its media moles to downplay layoffs and bribes
More IBM Layoffs (2025)
IBM is being scattered away, yet the media barely covers it. It'll just happen "silently" over time.
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 09, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, January 09, 2025