[LittleDan]

When I got out of school 4 years ago, people were already making the same arguments. While Google isn't perfect, I can't imagine a place I'd rather work, where I can really dig into technical details of things while having freedom to set my agenda in many ways, very smart coworkers and predictably high compensation. I don't think any of those things have changed in 4 years.

Talking about top CS schools/going to Stanford is really irrelevant. I went to Carleton College, which has a nice little CS department but not really well-known, and got a liberal arts education. Because I did some open-source work and maybe because of some academic projects, I was able to get lots of interviews and offers, all in the same range as people are discussing today. All Stanford does at a company like Google is get your foot in the door--small, poorly run startups may hire on that basis, but that's it.

My one piece of advice for people who want to get into the tech industry: Choose one open-source project and contribute to it over a long period of time (ideally starting in high school, but never too late). The short time span of college courses and lack of large projects (a semester is not long) means that you can't really develop the skills that you need to be effective by that alone. Large, open-source projects give you real experience in structuring code to be maintainable, working with others and receiving feedback, and understanding and changing existing code that other people wrote. It might also get you some nice internal references.