You're definitely taking the wrong impression from my post then. Do you code in C / C++?
If you've never had an issue compiling a large codebase as a new developer then I should either bow before your greatness or mock you for your inexperience because in large, complicated projects with 1000-line makefiles included from various sources, on a platform with various skews, flags and options, even the most talented developer can have issues with compilation - especially in most corporate scenarios where the exact command line you need for the internal build tool Steve wrote in 1996 is passed down through email and IM logs. OH and don't forget that some of the objects we link with are actually dummy files to be filled in by a shared library on the target that's been precompiled... OH and some of our functions are actually programmatically generated by a Perl script that runs as part of the build script. These are just some of the things I was exposed to as a junior at various companies.
Building gets messy, quick. Should it be? Probably not. Is it? Hell yes. Download boost or blender or something and try and compile for a non-standard or multiple platforms. My sibling even gives a specific open-source example (although open-source projects are typically MUCH better about getting building to be simple)
More importantly, my point is not that the junior doesn't know how to compile. Compilation is just a place where things get very messy very quickly, and a precise explanation of what was done needs to be given so that the senior can guide the junior along a proper debugging path. Your attitude is precisely the thing I'm recommending against.
> a file.
Whoever needs to only compile one file? That's not the hard part :)