Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview

There's a subtle-but-sneaky way to play this game.

Put in a patent application. Abandon it.

Congratulations, your patent is now going to come up in any competent patent examiner's initial search as "potential prior art".

Patent the core technology (the "you have to do it this way" stuff), but salt the earth around it so nobody can get a patent on the sub-optimal alternatives.

Also leave subtle but important details out of the application. Your conductive ink is silver but has to have, say, palladium added to make it stable? Forget to mention the palladium, and expand the claims to cover mixtures of different metals. See if the examiner allows it.