I think it depends on what part of Silicon Valley you're aiming for. A lot of the big-name places seem to be weird and incredibly theory/algorithms-heavy, whereas most other places being good at organizing systems is more important. But go too far down the scale and you'll find lot of the small startups need you to have context across the entire stack - you might be doing Ruby one moment, CSS the next, then BGP configuration for your cloud gateway after that. Places that are medium-small to large-but-unsexy can provide more of the entry-level experience. (Not a lot of them are really good, though, so you can't always expect to stay working there forever.)