It's a good guideline when you're early on in your programming career, but I've been surprised by how many compiler bugs I have independently re-discovered in my career. One of the curses of my job is that I work with ancient compilers. About half a dozen times I have stumbled on a bug, spent the better part of a day debugging my code, only to find that I'm being bitten by a documented GCC bug that was fixed a decade ago.