At a company I worked for we had a strong incentive program to submit patent applications for our work, where each listed inventor would receive a monetary paym

At a company I worked for we had a strong incentive program to submit patent applications for our work, where each listed inventor would receive a monetary payment of ~$2-3k if the patent was deemed worthy and filed by our lawyers, and an additional bonus if it was granted some years later. The problem is the patent applications would flood in from employees with the hopes that the non-technical lawyers would miss some due diligence like finding prior art. Worst case is you wasted a bit of time on the application, best case is you just made an easy $3k. Now the company was not a patent troll, so I don't recall hearing about any instances of them actually suing anyone over patents. But it still opened my eyes to how ridiculous the software patent process really is. You don't have to create anything, write any code, or even be the brightest engineer with a unique idea. You just need to get that idea past enough people. The entire industry is a scam for money, no matter which end of it you're on.