Years ago, I wrote up a patent application at work. It had to get approved by my management chain, and then a team of lawyers at the company interviewed me. They wrote up a 50-page version of my 2-page explanation and then sent it off to the US Patent Office. Years later, the patent office replied saying that they agreed that my invention was unique and patentable. The Microsoft lawyers contacted me for an update to decide if it was still worth patenting, and they decided to go for it. After more waiting, there’s now an official patent recorded with my name on it: US 11,475,017 B2 “Asynchronous data enrichment for an append-only data store.” If you go to their search tool and search for “((US-11475017-B2).did. AND USPT.dbnm.)”, it should return our patent as the only result.
This isn’t going to change my life or make the company a ton of money, but there’s something very satisfying about having my name enshrined in the USPTO as the inventor of a brand-new idea!