I think part of the problem is that the people hiring are looking for shortcuts and won't accept any approach that requires more than a certain amount of time.

I've read comments about how X company got hundreds or even thousands of applicants for a position, but they can't possibly look through all of them. Well...

When I worked at the USPTO as a patent examiner, I never had that few documents to search. If I said that I had only 1,000 documents to search, my supervisor would probably be suspicious that my search was poor quality. I was able to find prior art within the first couple hundred documents searched at times, but that doesn't mean that the search could stop at the USPTO. Stopping early like that can come back to haunt an examiner later on when the attorney revises the application. There were many applications where I closely examined hundreds of documents, often looking at drawings and/or text for particular features with a list checked for every single document. I can think of one water heater patent application where I probably closely examined thousands of documents looking for a particular shape of a component, and eventually found it in a fairly obscure Korean patent!

You can complain about the USPTO's quality all you want, but they're at least doing a better job than HR, who simply gives up and says they can't find it when it's right there if they actually put in the effort. The USPTO rejects nearly everything with prior art in the first action.

A competent software developer demands a higher salary than an incompetent one. So when I apply for a software developer job, I get told I am overqualified. I don't work for peanuts like an incompetent developer.

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