To expand on this, there are some companies that seem like non-software companies, yet still treat software as a competitive advantage rather than a cost center. I worked for a big bank that did their best to stay six months to a year ahead of other banks on technology. The marketing folks were constantly coming to us and saying, "Give us cool features that we can sell." It was a fun place to work.
I also worked for an insurance company that viewed technology as a necessary evil that should be as cheap as possible. The marketing folks there were constantly complaining about how much time and money the company was wasting on technology. (Curiously, they also complained that the company's technology offerings were hopelessly far behind its competitors.) It was a miserable experience.
If you're looking for a job, ask questions about management support and budget priorities. If they're evasive or they say things like, "we're proud of how far we stretch our investment," it's not a good place to work. You can also ask how the company compares technically to its competitors. If they're evasive or talk about how they're trying to catch up, that's a bad sign, too.
A good example of what I mean are large, innovation-less companies with "start-up in a large company" efforts to bring themselves some relevance that almost always become the worst of large company inertia / legacy with the fiscal and market position disadvantages of start-ups. I've been through at least 4 of these efforts with varying degrees of "success." And while they're a large part of my career and I want to believe it can happen, I have no evidence of this working out well and am convinced it's a rather high risk to take with disproportionate upside.
Do you have any thoughts about what the general environment will be like, and is there any chance the place will be mired in bureaucracy? I'm relatively early in my career as well, and have never worked for a Big Co before.
I'd love to get in touch with you, but you don't have contact info in your profile. I'll be grateful if you can drop me a line - mailshanx at yahoo dot co dot in
Look for a deep culture of respected and accomplished leaders in software up and down the hierarchy. If nobody in a position of authority has delivered software successfully before that you can recognize as an engineer, pass because culture and experience among executives is massively important and their priorities should focus on long term growth (Amazon was ridiculed by enterprise vendors while I screamed that they will eat their business in a decade - they don't care because they'll go somewhere else while I have to deal with the very expensive consequences of bad software). There are too many great companies around today to waste time on mediocre companies - it is better to be jobless for months or years waiting for a great company to accept you for your talents than to waste some of the best years on companies where your best efforts will result in second rate winnings. It's a huge risk to work for mediocre companies that will not put the work you will have to put in themselves.
My e-mail is djk29a on Google's e-mail service. Not sure how the first part of your e-mail works out and I'm several days late so hopefully this is relevant advice.
Find the leaders that understand all programmers need training (especially around process and coding standards). Sell that on your passion and that you want to become good _quickly_.
And to be a little cheeky, Pivotal (compared to Pivotal Labs, not the same but still) is nowhere near a "start-up" company by most definitions. They're planning for an IPO and are pulling in many millions in revenue like Cloudera and HortonWorks, it's hardly possible to keep these plans from being kept under wraps.
Instead of recommending what people should go after college for their first job, I'll recommend what people should not do:
1. Work for a consulting / contracting company that has companies people don't like to work directly for. This is probably the worst arrangement of bureaucracy possible because you have the maximum possible layers of management overhead combined with business incentives to keep your compensation and impact upon the business as little as possible. Working for a web development shop that has big customers doesn't count here IMO because your work as an engineer is largely unchanged regardless of your customer paying you $2000 or $200k.
2. Work in corporate IT. These are high-turnover positions for many reasons. It seems like there's a lot of money in it, but it's mostly going to those that sell software to these places. People are miserable enough in F500 companies as it is, this is probably among the worst places for combination of stress, pay, and career mobility.
3. Work in a non-software company. A company whose business doesn't take its software seriously invariably treats its software and IT resources as cost centers meant to get maximum cost savings for as little money as possible via opex reduction and will, ironically, likely fail to make bigger expenditures required to keep costs (and really, wasting time) lower.
Being around non-motivated people in a demoralized environment is a great way to kill any starting career and learning what the signs of these organizational attributes are have important for avoiding really bad career moves.