I remember after I got older I eventually had some cubes next to mine that were perpetual "new college student hires" cubes.

I was / am by no means the best at my job technically, in fact some of those new guys were better out of the gate technically than I was in some ways. But I could get along with the new guys and enjoyed working with them. Over lunches and small talk I would quietly have discussions about "how to pick your battles" / "yeah that's absurd but here's an easy way to get around it rather than fight it" and more generally "amazingly easy things you can do to make your boss happy that cost you nothing at all". These lessons of course weren't me just telling them what to do, just planting ideas that they eventually would discover, hopefully sooner rather than later.

They were basically all the things I learned the hard way ;)