Right. It might be just a matter of legal departments cargo culting, but it's very common for companies to ask engineers not to read outside patents for this re

Right. It might be just a matter of legal departments cargo culting, but it's very common for companies to ask engineers not to read outside patents for this reason. One might think that it'd make sense to read through patents in order to avoid them, but that only works if the patents are actually even remotely understandable by a normal person. There are situations where patents need to be read, but it's not going to be done by a random engineer.