You sound just like my old pointy haired boss. I'll do with you, what I did with him. I'm going to roll my eyes and call you names when you talk to me, because I know you're too dumb to do my job and smart enough to know that.
This matrix is a bunch of crap. The ability to "get things done" is the most important factor of programmer competency. Every thing else is incidental.
Ideally a patent like that should be denied ( or can be challenged in court) based on prior art. Prior art refers to documentation of an idea prior to a patent filing. So for example a person would not be able to patent an idea that was described in an a magazine , newspaper , or academic paper, before the patent was applied for.
If you want to patent something, use it more as a defense mechanism, so that other people can't claim that you stole their idea.
Hope that helps.
This article completely misses the point. I want to know how many of the non-H1B workers at Microsoft used to be H1B's. And how about finding out percentage of engineers at all these companies. And personally I am so sick of hearing all these BS stories of H1B's stealing American jobs with low wages. I used to be on H1B and I made (and still do) more that all my friends who are American citizens or green card holders. I have green card now, and that hasnt affected my pay in any way.
ever since 9/11 the green card process has become excruciatingly slow. There are a ton of CS Masters and PhD's who graduated around. that time. Their H1-B visas are going to start expiring in the next 1-2 years. With no way of legally staying back in the US, all these guys and gals are going to go back to India or China, start their own startups, get bought off by Google, Yahoo et al.. and live happily ever after. All YC'ers beware. This is potentially a new set of competitors for you.
please include Markus Frind from PlentyOfFish. His story is both fascinating, inspiring and so not the norm.
Also.. it may be better if you dont include YC companies, since most of their stories are already so well publicized.