There's got to be a way to bring this system back to serve the purpose for which it was designed - encouraging innovation and not stifling it in courtrooms and endless litigation by corporations and moguls. Or maybe I'm just being overly optimistic here :(
Spirited away is one of (if not the) my favorite movies of all time. It may appear at times a bit weird to western eyes, but once you get past that it's blindingly beautiful animation with a sad and happy story. If you haven't seen it - I envy you :)
Oh god all that talk about COM, automation and IDispatch takes me back... Oh DCOM networking, the wonderful hours you'd spend trying to get the thing to connect to other machines on customer deployments, with all those wonderful registry configurations.. Anyone's who's ever done that stuff, man you can never forget :) a great Joel on software article as usual.
Starting from a lower place builds a degree of inner strength. Coming from a lower starting point can also help you learn and maintain a degree of humility. If you're able to do both that there's a higher chance you'll go far. That has been my experience with senior managers coming from India at a larger company. Those were the guys who were in senior positions and at least in my case I could clearly see and understand why.