Unless you have an unusual background, find the best big company you can and try and go there. I'm old so when I was in college it was Bell Labs. By the time

Unless you have an unusual background, find the best big company you can and try and go there. I'm old so when I was in college it was Bell Labs. By the time I got out it was Sun so I went there. Don't regret it for a minute and I stayed there for about 7 years. If you are a grad student thinking about a PhD, here's what I remember about that. A hard part (there are many) of a PhD is your thesis. Finding a good topic, while you are in school, is hard. However, go into industry and look around and you'll find topic after topic. Getting back to startup/big company, I would pick a big company if you can go to an interesting one and do interesting work. Facebook seems like they are doing a lot of pretty interesting systems stuff, languages, tools, etc, along with all the social stuff (that I don't pretend to understand). Google used to be the cool place but some of that has worn off, might still be worth a look but it would really depend on what you are doing. Oh, one other thought: don't be afraid of paying your dues. When I got to Sun I joined the kernel group and they gave the job nobody else wanted: make the kernel conform to the POSIX spec. Seems like a bunch of shit work but for a relatively fresh programmer it was a fantastic education. If I had turned up my nose at that work I would have lost out.