Absolutely. I didn't go to a powerhouse school for undegrad, and I've subsequently worked with a lot of people from "powerhouse" schools. In my experience, there's not much difference between a top MIT/Stanford/Berkeley undergrad and a top student where I went to school. The difference is in the distribution: the best schools can pick amongst great applicants, and therefore have a better average student.

The valley is very credentialist, in my experience. Most bigger companies are dominated by graduates from top programs, partly because they have dumb recruiting policies (i.e. paying big money for career fairs at top programs, and ignoring everyone else), partly because once you get a network of grads from a school, it tends to perpetuate itself.

But to the extent that this turns into a bias against students from other schools, it's an institutional weakness. Top programs don't have a monopoly on good students. They don't even have most of them. And the academic job market is so competitive that even the tiniest regional college is going to have faculty from top programs, teaching the same material as every other accredited program. Even the books are the same.

But, hey, you big guys keep fighting over the MIT grads and ignoring everyone else. More candidates for the rest of us.