While I understand that for entrepreneurial CS students, interning at a startup or building something awesome over a summer is ideal, I think that 1) the vast

While I understand that for entrepreneurial CS students, interning at a startup or building something awesome over a summer is ideal, I think that 1) the vast majority of students would be unable to find a sexy startup to work with and 2) you are vastly undervaluing the benefit of learning best practices and industry standards, which you will get plenty of at a decent-sized company. Far better (and likely) IMHO to get a job at a (probably medium-sized rather than large) company where you will get to do both new coding as well as code maintenance (learning to read someone else's code is a vastly undervalued skill that you won't learn "building something awesome"), learn as much as possible from their senior engineers, and then start building something cool on the side that isn't a stinking heap of unmaintainable feces like most undergraduate-level code I've ever seen. If you're a Rock Star Ninja who happens to be able to write quality code straight out of school, good for you, but I think most software developers out there would rather work with someone who's spent a year or two in apprentice mode as low man on some company's totem pole, rather than some hotshot out of school who probably turns up his nose at RDBMS's and Java.