You went to Berkeley. You get a somewhat different response from PR than someone like myself, who went to a crappy liberal arts school with no name in PA. They recognize the school, and expect that to be a substitute for skill - "oh he went to Ivy League / big state school, he must be a genius". Versus "I have never heard of that place, must be dumb not to go to an Ivy League".
Anecdote: I like to think I can write fizzbuzz in a couple languages.
I'm actually still going to Berkeley :). The only reason I brought it up was because the allegorical students in the blog post also go there.
I have actually avoided HR. I've been too lazy to send out resumes, and I only really want to work at small startups (at least for now). All of the interesting offers I got had some concrete spark independent of my education: for example, I got one after doing well at a hackathon and another from an HN post (but largely thanks to my knowing Haskell and having some interesting projects on GitHub).
I think that if you don't mind not working for an established company, you will have to worry much less about your education (but, probably, more about your actual skills). Of course there are good startups and bad startups, but I've found the good ones to be very good not just from a technical standpoint but also from an employment standpoint.
It also helps you are in CA. Like I said, I live in PA (specifically, rural PA, and I went to a local school) getting any networking whatsoever with not just the Bay area but any reasonable techy area is a pain. You don't know how nice it is to be a few hours train ride from networking galore until your next door neighbor is an Amish bishop :P
How far are you from the Philadelphia area? If you're looking east shoot me an email, the company I work for is always hiring engineers and we don't have any HR filtering yet :)
Anecdote: I like to think I can write fizzbuzz in a couple languages.