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[69Camaro]

A friend of mine says a GS-13 primary said that it was around 50%.  Is this true?

[CHAZZ_789]

2 year attrition rate was around that when I left (about 2 yrs ago)

[klaviernista]

A friend of mine says a GS-13 primary said that it was around 50%.  Is this true?

I'm surprised it is not higher.

I'll put it this way.  I came to the USPTO as part of a class of 75 new examiners.  When I left three years later, only 1 of the members of my class remained.

[stuffball]

Wow, that's nuts.  Of course, the same may have been true of my class.  I wouldn't know, I left in less than 2 yrs.

[mk1023]

.

[miner531]

So what happens to this 50%?  Are they hired by law firms for an increased salary? Decide that they can't hack it or do not enjoy it?  Perhaps an all of the above answer is likely, but it seems that there must be a typical root cause for this level of turnover.

[stuffball]

A lot (maybe even most) get hired by law firms.  That's what happened to me and many of my colleagues.  I only know of a few who went on to do things outside of law.

Others with more experience can correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that the engineering community doesn't consider USPTO experience valuable.  Then, transitioning from the USPTO back to real nuts-and-bolts engineering doesn't usually happen except for older examiners who had lots of real engineering work experience prior to the PTO.  There was only one guy I think of in my class who went back to real engineering.  He was this 50 year old engineer who had worked for intel for decades until they laid him off.  He went to some small engineering shop in CA.

[lawyer]

i have some know about attrition rate issue at the USPTO.so i share with u..

1. The USPTO's attrition rate is lower (8.5%) than the average attrition rate for Federal workers (11.2%).

2. The average attrition rate for USPTO patent examiners with 0-3 years experience is 15.5%. The average attrition rate for USPTO patent examiners with 3-30 years experience is 3.95%.

3. The attrition rate of patent examiners with 0-3 years experience, though measurably higher than the rest of the patent corps, appears to be well below the attrition rate experienced by similarly situated entities hiring more than 1,000 engineers in a year.

4. Examiners with the highest production requirements have the lowest attrition rates, and the examiners with the lowest production requirements have the highest attrition rates. In fact, 70% of all work in FY 2007 was done by examiners with 3 or more years of experience who exceeded their production goals by an average of 8% and had an average attrition rate of 3.95%.

I hope you are understand about attrition rate.if you will get more knowledge about USPTO,so i have give u link.

[klaviernista]

I hope you are understand about attrition rate.if you will get more knowledge about USPTO,so i have give u link.

I'd love to see the link, because I (respectfully) disagree with almost every point you made.  It is well known that the USPTO has serious attrition problem, especially with new examiners.

I'll put it to you this way.  Around 2000 or 2001, the USPTO started an initiative to hire ~1000 new examiners per year (to my knowledge, the USPTO still has that hiring goal today).  At that time, there were about ~3000 examiners in the examining corps.  That said, I am fairly certain the PTO succeeded in hiring close to the 1000 examiner goal each year.  But I am 99.99999999999999% certain that the examining corps. is not topping out around 10k.  In fact, I would bet money that it is not even close to 5k.

I do agree that attrition slows down quite a bit when considering examiners that have been with the PTO for 5+ years. 

[stuffball]

"the examiners with the lowest production requirements have the highest attrition rates"

Yes, but all this means is that Examiners who've been around longer are more likely to stay. 

The two year attrition rate for the USPTO is pretty close to 50%.  That may decrease in the current economic climate.  however, if it does, the PTO is likely to become an even worse place to work.  I have no doubt that the management there would love it if their examiners had fewer options to leave. 

[MYK]

I hope you are understand about attrition rate.if you will get more knowledge about USPTO,so i have give u link.

I'd love to see the link, because I (respectfully) disagree with almost every point you made.  It is well known that the USPTO has serious attrition problem, especially with new examiners.

The "link" is in his signature (bottom of his post) and is spam for an adoption lawyer.  It appears that "lawyer" finally figured out how to create links so that his attempts to spam might actually work at long last.

[lazytortoise]

I was trying to reply to this thread and somehow a new thread was created... Deleted that one-

I hope you are understand about attrition rate.if you will get more knowledge about USPTO,so i have give u link.

I'd love to see the link, because I (respectfully) disagree with almost every point you made.  It is well known that the USPTO has serious attrition problem, especially with new examiners.

I'll put it to you this way.  Around 2000 or 2001, the USPTO started an initiative to hire ~1000 new examiners per year (to my knowledge, the USPTO still has that hiring goal today).  At that time, there were about ~3000 examiners in the examining corps.  That said, I am fairly certain the PTO succeeded in hiring close to the 1000 examiner goal each year.  But I am 99.99999999999999% certain that the examining corps. is not topping out around 10k.  In fact, I would bet money that it is not even close to 5k.

I do agree that attrition slows down quite a bit when considering examiners that have been with the PTO for 5+ years. 

For the examiners around, if you browse to the intranet directory http://ptoweb.uspto.gov/patents/opt/documents/ you will see the file examiner_roster.xls. This is a roster of examiners currently in the academy.

If you dig around a little more you'll see http://ptoweb.uspto.gov/patents/opt/documents/archive/examiner_roster_9-4-07.xls which is a historical picture of the academy as of 9/4/2007. Unlike the file I mentioned first, this one lists previous examiners not just current examiners (examiners that quit or were fired are highlighted in red).

The relevance to this discussion is the inaugural academy class (January 23, 2006). As of 9/04/2007 (19.5 months after start date0), 39 out of 132 were gone (30%). That's only after 19.5 months. After 3 years it could easily be 50%.

Interesting thread. I have been reading about the attrition rate at the USPTO and would love to be able to compute it. Looks like the 2 links mentioned above don't work. Would have been interesting to take a look at the raw numbers.

In any case, I was trying to compute the attrition rate as accepted within the industry. For example,

Annualized attrition% = (voluntary attrition per month/(start head count for the month + end headcount for the month)/2)*100*12

Assuming
- 3000 examiners beginning of 2001
- 5000 examiners end of 2008
- 4000 is the average examiner strength over the time period (8 years)
- So, net additions = 2000
- 1000 examiners hired every year (average of 83.33 per month)
- 6000 examiners lost between the period (average 62.5 per month)
- Since there is no real data, we need to use average numbers. Doesn't really account for involuntary attrition (firing), attrition due to promotions to non-examining cadre etc (so, basically this is a very rough estimate). Accounting for these will likely bring the number down a bit.

Annual Attrition Rate = ((62.5)/((4000 + 4083.33)/2))*100 * 12 = 36.71%

For comparison, at the companies I have worked in the past (software/hardware), the rate is roughly 7-9%.

Looking at some of the other threads on this forum and anecdotally, it seems to me that 2 things occur-
1. Quite a few fresh grads appear to be hired.
2. People don't know what to expect coming in.

If you hire a grad fresh out of college that has been doing stuff hands on (I am talking about EE/CS and the like) and ask him/her to read/search a bunch of documents all the time, it will probably drive them out of their mind very soon. That may be one reason why they quit asap. Would be nice to know how many new hires are fresh grads and how many of those quit within the first 3 years.

Secondly, I think the PTO recruiters do a poor job of describing the term "production environment" (I was offered a position a few years ago and didn't take it. Obviously, its still on my mind...). They very casually talk about it and after folks come in, they are probably overwhelmed by it.

Anyway, just some thoughts...

[Wiscagent]

I never worked at the USPTO, nevertheless I find this discussion about attrition rate interesting.  I used the same starting assumptions as "lazytortoise" and conclude that the annual attrition rate is 13.6% rather than 36.7% as lazytortooise calculated.  This is how I did the calculation:

1/1/2001:  3000 examiners.  During the year 13.6% (408) leave*; 2592 remain; then 1000 are hired.
1/1/2002:  3592 examiners.  During the year 13.6% (489) leave; 3103 remain; then 1000 are hired.
1/1/2003:  4103 examiners.  During the year 13.6% (558) leave; 3545 remain; then 1000 are hired.
1/1/2004:  4545 examiners.  During the year 13.6% (618) leave; 3927 remain; then 1000 are hired.
1/1/2005:  4927 examiners.  During the year 13.6% (670) leave; 4257 remain; then 1000 are hired.
1/1/2006:  5257 examiners.  During the year 13.6% (715) leave; 4542 remain; then 1000 are hired.
1/1/2007:  5542 examiners.  During the year 13.6% (754) leave; 4788 remain; then 1000 are hired.
1/1/2008:  5788 examiners.  During the year 13.6% (787) leave; 5001 remain.

*In terms of attrition rate it doesn't matter why they leave the examiners' core.  The point is that they are gone.
----------------------------------------------
I'm not arguing that lazytortoise is wrong and I am right in our calculations.  What I am pointing out, is that unless "attrition rate" is precisely defined, the number can be widely manipulated even with the same starting assumptions and data.  Given that the data are uncertain, the attrition rate is speculative.

[lazytortoise]

A couple of points-
Your calculation skips one additional year of hiring, but I don't think that would impact the final result meaningfully.

The reason for attrition kind of matters (for the purpose of this discussion) because we were trying to discuss (or so I assumed) attrition with the negative connotations attached to it. I mean, hypothetically, we could have a 1000 people hired every year because a 1000 of them got promoted to non-examining cadre Vs them quitting because they thought the job is lousy etc...

That said, what Wiscagent states is very true. One would need the real data and a clear definition of the term in order to make any sensible computation. I believe the higher number I computed is the attrition among only the newly hired examiners, not the entire examiner population (meaning, on an average, roughly about 35% of all newly hired examiners between the stated periods have quit). Of course, that definition of attrition rate is itself very debatable...