[whipoodle]

Sure, doing your time in those sorts of places and then moving on is a good approach. That's more or less what I did. (I went to college for CS, but I'm oldish.) But those jobs can suck for reasons that don't really have anything to do with technology.

While you're unlikely to catch me extolling the virtues of cool-guy startups, they do tend to have the benefit that they "get" developers and bias towards facilitating the work rather than the endless bullshit you tend to get sucked into in the bigger places.