Go work at a big company. The patent lawyers come around and ask what you've been working on, and a month or two later, your name's on 10 patents, none of which make any sense whatsoever. If you're very lucky you might get a dollar bill for each.
For a while at google you would get $5k per patent submission and $10k for each approved(?) one. Given how easy it was, I could have matched my annual salary. It's depressing how easy it is to get a system architecture (unimplemented) patented at bigco.
When I was at Microsoft, years ago, it took more effort to avoid having my name end up on a patent than I'd have had to exert if I'd actually wanted one.
