"But he says graduating students ought to be more aware of the benefits of gaining a few years of experience at a small- or medium-sized company before going of

"But he says graduating students ought to be more aware of the benefits of gaining a few years of experience at a small- or medium-sized company before going off to start their own." This depends highly on where you end up working. If you find yourself just maintaining someone else's crappy code, and/or working with people who can't serve as great mentors, I see joining a company as a potentially bad career-risk relative to either: a) spending a couple months working on an open-source project used by a company/group of hackers you really want to work for/be mentored by b) starting a business. (for a&b, be aware of your financial situation before considering the above options) I work with plenty of "industry" programmers who make much more money than me, but are afraid of developing new things or learning new languages, calling them "oh, that's one of those academic things" even after citing something cool being used with them in production.