>I am in a professional job, and I doubt I could afford a decent place to live without parental help other than a crappy flat in a dodgy area.
Then live in a the "crappy flat in a dodgy area".
>How people afford to live by themselves, on non-professional jobs I don't know.
Then don't live by yourself. I had 2 and 3 roommates over various times as a young person getting started. We split the rent in crappy small apartments.
Yes .. here you go: The article is about the self-entitled generation of "emerging adults" (apparently who range from 18 to 40) of which the author was a part of, but now spends his time writing long-winded articles rationalizing how they (he) are not lazy and self-entitled.
If you are an "emerging adult" at age 30, then there is a problem. Further, the author of this article claiming that these so called "emerging adults" are not lazy or self-entitled is ridiculous. It is clearly a case of "first world problems". The mere fact that these "emerging adults" have the luxury of living "on the dole" (whether parental or governmental) while they "figure out what they want to do with their lives" into their late 20s and early 30s is a clear case of self-entitlement.
If you don't have a place to live, food to eat, and shelter ... you "emerge" as an adult pretty quickly and figure out what you "want to do with your life" by DOING WORK you don't want to do to get said food, and shelter (i.e., to survive).
What is the saying? An absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.
Sorry .. that is totally disconnected from reality. Not only have wages NOT risen, they have stagnated (and not kept up with inflation). Further, if you look at the list (link is in this thread) of the companies along with the # H1Bs allocated to them/their ranking ... you'll see a certain big blue company in that list who is in the Top 5. They have been doing layoffs by the 1000s on a regular basis for years. I know. I work for them. I have seen personally at least 10 people on actively billing customer engagements (i.e., they were billing the customer, not riding the bench or working internally, etc.) layed off. These were highly skilled professionals with good reviews that were doing great work.
Further, I've seen many dozens of "replacements" come in in the form of H1Bs. These were literally DIRECT replacements. They were inexperienced and WORSE at the job.
This is no longer anecdotal. This is happening NOW. All over this country in the IBMs, Microsofts, etc.
It does not take a genius to see what is going on.
I've been in this industry for nearly 20 years. There is no shortage. There IS A HUGE SHORTAGE of engineers willing to work for the pay and conditions that an H1B will work for though.
If the supply of "highly skilled" people could not keep up with demand (which is what these companies lobbying Congress for uncapped H1Bs are effectively saying is the case), then salaries would be rising.
They are not.
/end of story. All other propaganda and testimony by these companies that say otherwise is bullshit.
1. No. Assumption being that any thing "invented" while working for IBM, belongs to IBM. The developer does not "own" it. He/she is only listed as basically the "(co)-inventer". He cannot go to Google and "use" it with out licensing / agreement from IBM. Now .. it is plausible that an employee invented something totally on their own time while an employee of IBM. That said, if this had any value (now or in the future), it is entirely likely and plausible that IBM could make a case legally for having rights to said invention. This is especially true if your "invention" is in the same domain you work in for IBM (e.g. if you are a middleware developer for IBM Software Group and you make a new type of messaging technology .. on "your own time" in the evening/weekends).
2. This is a grey area that will ALWAYS be open to legal interpretation (enter the lawyers). There are different things involved in your question: Are there non-competes in your employment contracts?, are they actually enforceable legally?, will they be enforced legally?, what specifically is the "technology"? So .. this is not possible to answer beyond just saying: It depends. It is case-by-case and is balance between an business' intellectual property, any contractual agreements (non-compete) you may have signed, and your right to work / find gainful employment.
I have not, but was on teams/worked with people that had submitted and were awarded patents. These weren't scientists or researchers. One was not even a developer. I hate to give too many details, as litigious as this "beast" (your word, good description) is, but I would say that a very large percentage are just junk/obvious crap. There are quite a few divisions within IBM and some are obviously very much dedicated to research and high-end engineering (e.g. IBM Almaden). You would expect patents coming from there. However, when practitioners in services divisions "reinvent" the wheel on something trivial, document it sufficiently and vaguely enough (especially after it has been through cycles of lawyer-ese) ... and patents are issued, it is laughable.
Here is an example of one that is not exactly it (for reason stated above), but similar enough to illustrate absurdity: Think of a Firefox plug-in that would let you right-click at a certain point on a long web page (e.g. on a word, a highlighted paragraph, anyplace .. that is a couple pages down on a long news article) and choose "Bookmark". This would save a "Bookmark" to your toolbar that you could later click and it would not only take you to the web page, but also scroll you to the exact spot you were at before on the page.
This type of stupid simple functionality ... would actually be patented by IBM. Yes .. that functionality had already really existed in one form or another, from multiple methods, yet ... no other company had the absurd gall and audacity to try to actually patent it. You would now search this patent # on USPTO.gov and read it and be amazed at how absurdly abstract and broad this vague function would be described. I would guess it would take you 10-15 minutes of reading and deciphering to even begin to realize what it was for (and would be as stupid simple as what I mentioned above). This is IBM's patent machine.
I can't speak for IBM's research divisions, but I know of no quota for other IBM practitioners (say in one of their services divisions). It is a "badge of honor" in someways (or so they think for some of those folks that submit this stupid crap) as you do have a "Patents" section on the internal profile intranet where it lists if you are a (co)-creator of any patents. Of they hundreds I've seen on people's profile, I don't recall seeing anything meaningful. Mostly of the type that we talk about in places like this as "Patent Troll" material.
Creating / getting a patent at IBM is comical. Sort of like a game. All you have to do is document something, pass it to their patent lawyers ... and they fill it with so much verbose lawyer language and fluff that any normal person can't read and interpret it. Then it gets submitted and ... voila ... patent pending (and quite typically a couple years later, patented).
(Source: Me, a former employee of IBM (Indian Business Machines)).
Then live in a the "crappy flat in a dodgy area".
>How people afford to live by themselves, on non-professional jobs I don't know.
Then don't live by yourself. I had 2 and 3 roommates over various times as a young person getting started. We split the rent in crappy small apartments.