[req2]

As someone who has mostly unsuccessfully looked for junior positions...

I see some, but not many, junior positions on job sites like 37signals' or Stack Overflow's, or Monster, or Dice... A lot of the 'junior' positions want things that don't seem terribly junior- several years experience in a certain conjunction of technologies.

My computer science education has largely come from books like K&R and Programming Pearls, C2Wiki, Wikipedia, and a whole bunch of personal projects in Python, C, and occasionally C++. It's not exactly conducive to the commonly posted requirements for a junior position.

My limited perspective suggests it's a lot easier to make a good junior engineer than it is to find one that meets your requirements.