Honestly, if that video, et. al. is 11 years old, then Eliot is old enough to participate here -- I'd love to hear HIS side of the story and I bet the HN crew could find him an engineering internship in like 30 seconds!
Hey George! We should catch up! (to readers: I was the guy who hired George as an intern and he was awesome. so AMA too!)
AOLServer was so, so, so far ahead of it's time. It had a WYSIWYG HTML editor years before Dreamweaver that could post content to the server. The integrated (Illustra!) Database and TCL interpreter meant you could build basically anything with it. Props to Jimbo and Doug...
We built what I think might have been the worlds first massively multi-homed, self-provisioning hosting service (called, creatively, "Navi-Service") with it. Think Linode but in 1997.
Two things that still really matter in the (dire sounding) scenario you are painting: PEOPLE and RISK. SO here are my two recommendations -- they somewhat conflict, but depending on what kind of person you are (and are becoming!) one will resonate so just follow it:
1) PEOPLE: The relationships you make early in your career can end up being the most valuable thing you take away from your first couple of jobs. Go places where a) you like the people, b) they challenge you and you learn from them, and c) they share your values. People that were throwing up in the back of my car in college became lifelong friends -- now they are industry leaders, and we'll never lose that bond...
2) RISK: Take as much risk as you can stomach. You literally have nothing to lose right now, and you can try and fail at a bunch of things before other priorities (mortgage, wife, kids, whatever) make you risk averse. If you go to a startup right now, and it totally bombs, so what?! You just dust yourself off and do it again. It would be a shame to take a "safe" job early in your career, there will be lots of time for that.
Here's an example of how they conflict: if you go to a big company, there will be lots of opportunities to meet people, but no risk. If you go do a startup, there are only a few people, but lots of risk/opportunity.
For the next 10 years, expose yourself to as many experiences as you can, at some point something will click and you can run down that rabbit hole.