Completely agree. In fact one of the biggest problems our office has with new hires fresh out of college, many of which are really bright kids, is that they hav

Completely agree. In fact one of the biggest problems our office has with new hires fresh out of college, many of which are really bright kids, is that they haven't read enough BIG pieces of code. When working alone it might not matter but when working in a team of 50 coders on a million line code base that goes across 5 continents and 10 different hardware platforms... Being able to consume and understand large chunks of code and how they fit together is essential. Personally, for any young programmers I'd suggest you practice reading and understanding large software modules... example: some big, active, corner of the linux kernel. (I'm a C / C++ systems developer so I'm biased).