That’s just a cynical response meant to devalue the OP. When people see a few patent #’s on a resume from a kid coming out of college, of course it’s a positive.
And I'm only going to view them positively if they are genuinely novel. If I can trivially find prior art or its another of those "with a computer" software patents, it's going to be a very big red flag.
Of course, this is just my own anecdote, and you may very well be right in the broader scale.
Also, why would it be a big red flag if you can find prior art? Whether or not there is prior art probably has very little to do with how capable of a developer the individual is.
If I can find prior art that is effectively their patent, it shows to me that they were engaged in patenting something that shouldn't be patented. I have strong personal feelings about that, and I do not much want to work with someone that believes that every idea that _can_ be patented _should_ be patented.
With that said, there are many other reasons I would reject a candidate before I would reject them over this. If anything, with the relatively small number of resumes that I get on a weekly basis, anyone having any patents on their resume is going to raise a red flag that I am going to poke at more. It also gives me another topic to engage the candidate on, and on one occasion that lead to a conversation that made me vote to hire the candidate.
Also, after talking with someone who had obtained a few patents (his work did not nearly reflect the calibre of an inventor), the expensive and convoluted process of filing for a patent means that the uniqueness of an invention may not be the most critical factor when obtaining one. I observed this when I worked at some companies hwo actively discouraged patenting because they had no resources to maintain and defend patents.