Here's what I did, and it worked out really well for me (I made $68 / hr last year, 3 years out of undergraduate). I got a job that paid a miserly $30,000 / yr at first, but it was a small company and I got tons of experience. I was in way over my head at first as you can probably guess from reading everybody else's posts. But I worked and learned hard, and after that it was a piece of cake.
If you are like me, I only wrote a couple of thousand of lines of code in college. I'm up to somewhere around 150,000 now, and I feel proportionally more confident and capable. I just scored an internship at Google actually.
Then my only problem was that I got bored, so I'm spending all that money on a masters degree, which I am thoroughly enjoying.