The point about improving things obviously has two sides to it – without research and backup, early “improvement” could make one look foolish. On the other hand given a proper opportunity and supporting arguments, the same would show one as insightful and valuable.

One such personal story involved me suggesting a switch in favour of the Firefox browser. The suggested improvement (I was talking security) was brushed off and I was told to wait until the next major release (ether 1.0 or 1.5). That actually happened to come soon after, and I have excitedly send out a group email, alerting of the “improvement”.

Now even though the email clearly originated from my name, and was signed as “student” – it was written well enough to have some people confuse it for something of much more authority. I did not completely take the existing office culture into the account, and ended up causing a small scale commotion. That was one of my “junior programmer” mistakes.

“Don’t expect your school report to earn your instant respect.” This is true, but when I got hired, I got hired with the qualifications obtained through self learning on the side of my original studies. I don’t even have my bachelor degree in IT yet, and they were still so impressed of me that I could choose between jobs. To sum it up, it is what you do that gives you respect, not what a school report says.

“Don’t try to improve things straight away” This statement should almost apply to every new junior programmer, but only if the situation of the company let you. One of my practical tasks given to me for the second round of the interviews was to be a stone cold critic of some of the sites they had. I was ruthless and suggested new standards, channel choices . That fresh and outsider perspective, engtech mentions this aswell, was the key that they liked about me. Short: be modest, but when you have the go, go for it.

One other key thing that you don’t mention in particular is that many publishing sites (ezines and such) still don’t have a clue on how things work on the web (when the junior programming job is web relative). They may want fancy gadgets and ad-o-rama on every page fubaring the site, some good stuff, some very bad stuff , it is our job, as a junior programmer, to be open to ideas, but also be professional enough to turn down stupid ideas.

Anyway, this was my two cents..

“Ask for work” — again, so true. You might find working on your blog and checking slashdot/digg very interesting, but that won’t help you get more respect.