What do you get if you publish a paper in a highly-ranked journal?

"The next question is whether there’s anything wrong with this idea, and if so, what. It makes me uncomfortable, but that’s not the appropriate measure. As long as the journals themselves keep up their editorial standards, the main effect would seem to be that their editorial staffs must get an awful lot of China-derived manuscripts whose authors are hoping to get lucky."

Well, I'd offer that this analysis ignores how science has historically worked.

Essentially, science has involved something like a "club" of individuals who can be trusted to make a sincere effort to find the true. Certainly, the use of exact instruments and the theoretical reproducibility of experiments were important but also dealing with individuals are reliable, systematic and trustworthy was an important thing.

Which is to say that science journals aren't designed to filter out articles which are wholly fraudulent, a tissue of lies cleverly created to mimic an actual scientific breakthrough. With a clever enough person, naturally, there is no way to see fraud from the article, one would have to lab at the laboratory, attempt to reproduce the experiment and so-forth (and reproducibility was the key historically, most experiments weren't actually reproduced and no journal is going to maintain a lab to reproduce submitted articles - except perhaps in CS where a program might submittable).

And there you have it. The lab coated scientist is a movie character but be scientist, as least once, was more than to engage in some activities. It was to be part of the "broad march of progress" where the lesser-scientist still helped move things forward by small, honest iterations of basic research (and this "club" arguably was disproportionately and unfairly white, male and first-world but every process has its weaknesses).

A move which makes the pursuit of science a purely adversarial affair, by consigning poor performs to absolute poverty and giving fairly vast rewards to good performs is going to break the club everywhere.

And the implications of the end of science as an idealist pursuit vary from field to field. Fraud in CS or math might be impossible or might be rendered impossible with suitable measures. But in social sciences or other fields, things could get nasty indeed.

you have my admiration twice, then.

it doesn't count for much from me to you, i know.

but improving the human body of knowledge is, in a wide sense, its own reward.

However, people still had to like you in the interview and job talk.

This is negotiable upfront for industrial research positions. You should always review your IP contract inside your job offer packet and battle HR/management hard on the rights to the IP and compensation surrounding it. Most boilerplate language assigns all IP rights to the company you work for with a maximum of $1 consideration paid for your work (to satisfy contract law if it is ever argued in a court), with acknowledgements or minor credit to you in the official documentation.

Needless to say, you shouldn't blindly agree to that unless your base salary is commensurate with such a loss of control and future rights of your work.

If you're going for your Ph.D. then your goal is to further the art.

Technical development and design that results in some "method and apparatus" to do a particular thing is patentable, but the research required before that R&D that leads to understand how stuff works and what might work is not patentable. And that's not speaking about less technical fields of science where nothing is patentable, or computer science which is not patentable in much of the world (software patents aren't valid in EU and other places).

Also, patenting is expensive. Especially because you need to file a patent in multiple major markets, you need multiple different patent lawyers, if you're outside of USA then filing a patent in USA is a bit of a hassle, and just for USA+main EU countries gets quite costly quick - so that's a reason not to patent things unless you have a clear picture that some product is going to violate that patent and thus it'll become valuable.