It is their loss, and I don't want to work with organizations that hire like that. But that's how hiring is done in academia. A lot of the non-academic research

It is their loss, and I don't want to work with organizations that hire like that. But that's how hiring is done in academia. A lot of the non-academic research labs work similarly. (Classified research does not have strict publication requirements in my experience, though.) Having a job doing valuable research would be nice. I'm not too picky about the topic, but it seems that most employers view the capabilities of a candidate very narrowly. So I'm probably stuck with things like what I did during my PhD.