I guess I've been in your situation as a CS student. I dreaded the thought of working for one of the big Dutch IT companies or consulting firms and their string

I guess I've been in your situation as a CS student. I dreaded the thought of working for one of the big Dutch IT companies or consulting firms and their string of boring and/or failing projects. None of the Dutch start-ups appealed to me, I didn't feel ready to start my own, and I figured I could learn more from success than from failure. If you're studying computer science in university, I can really recommend getting an internship at a major American company. It's very useful to get a peek in the kitchen of hugely successful companies. They can be a bit tricky to get into from Europe. Some universities give better access than others. I did an MSc in Parallel and Distributed Computer Systems at VU Amsterdam. An internship at Google, Facebook, or Amazon is almost a standard part of the program. Of course, you do have to pass the interviews yourself, and work very hard in general. Most of the TU's also have pretty good access to Google and Microsoft internships. I did a 5 month internship at Amazon right after I finished college and it was a fantastic experience. Amazon is a start-up-like environment, with small, autonomous teams churning out new services and features all the time. You typically get a good deal of freedom to plot your own course and rethink the way things are done if you dare. "Disagree & commit" they like to call it. There are tons of really smart and experienced people to learn from, very interesting problems that force you to really understand distributed systems top to bottom, and some brilliantly simple solutions to problems such as large-scale software deployment. One of the best parts of the experience is figuring out how the business works and why things are done in a certain way. I was part of launching a new Amazon Web Service called CloudFront during my time there, and came up with a couple of new concepts that are still in use today. Different companies have different cultures, but I know many people who had similarly good experiences as interns at Google or Facebook. The experience does depend heavily on the team that you end up in, but also on how well-rounded and adaptive you are by then. Take your time. I can also really recommend studying/finishing Computer Science. University is a unique chance to develop independent, analytical thinking together with your peers and build up a solid background in the field, which will give you a huge advantage throughout your career. Remember that for every dropout millionaire, there is someone like Larry Page, Sergey Brin, or Jeff Bezos with a prestigious cum laude MSc degree outsmarting them on the long run. Speaking of which, try to aim for cum laude, not because anyone cares, but because working hard on hard topics makes you smarter. After the internship, I went on to do a PhD in cooperative self-driving cars, because I found that a hugely interesting problem, but I kept a part-time software development job at Amazon. btw, in case you didn't notice, Mendix is originally a Dutch company, so you might not have to look very far.