Yeah, I didn't realize grad school wasn't part of these considerations. That said, I think the graduate school vs. undergraduate line gets kind of blurry for hacker types. An awesome Scheme hacker coming into MIT freshman year is going to have access to Gerry Sussman right out of the gate. No need to go to grad school for that sort of thing. And it's not entirely clear that a Master's buys you much in the software industry regardless of whether you do a startup or work for BigCo, so your chance to meet hacker types is sorta limited to your undergraduate days in many cases.