That was back when the first dot-com bubble was rapidly inflating, and it seemed that all you had to do was put in a few years at Netscape, Sun or SGI, and then go found a startup, and you'd be a guaranteed success. People really believed this!
In reality, the job environment consisted of those few known companies plus this big spread of unknowns (much like today, actually, except back then they were actually hiring). Nobody knew which ones would go out of business, which ones would succeed, and which ones would mean Maseratis for their early employees. I mean nobody had a clue. If you graduated in Comp sci or Comp eng or EE, you basically just rolled the dice and picked one, and that ended up being the difference between doing astoundingly well and just putzing along after 20 years.