Comment by bmacho
13 hours ago
It's like looking at the early internet and then suggesting teenagers should write browsers as their projects instead of webpages.
13 hours ago
It's like looking at the early internet and then suggesting teenagers should write browsers as their projects instead of webpages.
If someone writes a browser in their teens, they will probably learn more about the web than if they were just writing web pages
They'll learn so much more that won't transfer to as many job opportunities. For ex, say more about C++ and less about cutting edge CSS (because modern browser tech is an ocean). I suppose they might luck into other adjacent or unrelated roles with the same skills.
I have a hard time imagining anything where writing a browser wouldn't be an excellent transferable foundation. Even your example: writing css will never teach you as much as writing a css engine.
CSS wasn’t around in the early web.
Building a browser in the early web was actually a very achievable goal for exactly the reasons it isn’t now. There was not JS. No CSS. No SVG. In fact very few widely supported image formats (and graphical browsers weren’t around in the earliest days of the web anyway). TLS didn’t exist. HTML only had a subset of methods. And even POST was usually just managed by CGI/BIN calling an external process, often written in C++ or Perl.
It was a simpler time.
They will also know the fundamental underpinnings of the web, you know - the thing that those html devs are actually using.
That’s like saying someone who fabricates cars doesn’t have the skills to drive them. Perhaps not, but they’re very well placed to pick it up quickly. They’ve also shown they can do something far more challenging, which is actually better than hiring for narrow immediate skills.
In other words: I’d hire that candidate in a heartbeat.
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Are you asserting that C++ is not a marketable skill?
If anyone reading this has this un-marketable skill, Carnegie robotics in Pittsburgh is hiring
carnegie-robotics.breezy.hr/p/2d85f5321cc7-software-engineer
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This is like saying writing a compiler doesn't give you transferable skills. The surrounding competencies required to do this grant a pretty large amount of broad domain awareness
A few did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake_Ross
In the meantime Mozilla was mocked on slashdot.org and elsewhere relentlessly after the first two years of the project when nobody believed there would be any value in the effort. Hats off to the team that took around five years to get to Firefox 1.0 (and released Mozilla browser in the interim). It took a lot of conviction to see it through.
Sure, you had to pick the browser I despise worse than Netscape 4.
That may have worked at the time, but no companies are interested in learning projects today. If you didn’t do the reqs list for the last 5-10 years with the same title, forget about it. Because there are dozens of folks who have, lined up. No one is indulging career changers (and most fresh grads) for the time being.
> No one is indulging career changers (and most fresh grads) for the time being.
Oh hey thank you for that. It really helps. Hope you have your rug pulled from under you today too.
— signed, a career changer trying his best.
it's just a fact of the market, it's not an attack on you.
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If you learnt to build a browser in 2000 you're probably doing well for yourself lol.
Not a lot of demand, but also probably not a lot of supply.
For this example, if you built a browser in 2000 it would put you in a great position to launch android in 2008. I think this is pg’s point. You spend all this time learning the interesting bits and when an inflection comes along that makes a new product or service possible you could be the one to likely launch it
Each new bet will be expensive and depend less on technical merit than luck and having a backup so your family doesn't starve.
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That’s like saying if you can dunk in 8th grade you could be the next LeBron James. A LOT more things have to fall perfectly in place at the perfect time for that end result to materialize.
I am talking from the perspective of the individual developer.
You don't need your impressive product to succeed to land a good career.
If Alice is doing LLM-from-scratch work today, and Bob is doing agent harness work today, Bob's project is far more likely than Alice's to become useful/popular/profitable.
But if neither project survives, in 5 years, Alice will be more employable/at a higher market rate than Bob.
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This was his point. Being prepare to launch a produce when the opportunity comes.
There is an entire graveyward of browsers, almost all that didn't die are now forgotten.
Sure, but I'm sure most of their lead devs are well paid now.
In general C++ work and similar, if not in Chrome development.
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I think the point isn't that you'll necessarily build a great browser (or LLM), but the experience will benefit you in other ways.
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If any were built by teenagers, I’d imagine those teenagers ended up with pretty good careers in technology?
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Are you fingerpointing Marc Andreessen?
Well, there's a lot more to learn from the former than the latter ...
Really? The latter was immediately useful to lots of people which is motivating, and it had a nice smooth learning curve (html -> js -> php -> databases -> apps -> backend). Learning HTML is the first step to learning how to make full blown apps. Making a browser at 17 is like trying to climb Everest as your first hike. The expected outcome is burnout and demotivating failure. At best you'll learn some C++ or Rust.
17 is an interesting age. There are way too many comments here saying things like, 17 year olds should just do whatever seems interesting or bum around the world or focus on getting into university. But historically most kids were expected to be productive adults at 16 or 18. 17 is about the right time to be thinking seriously about what kind of work you'll do, how you'll make a living. University won't help and will just delay this decision.
Anecdotally, I think it's great advice.
I contributed to a browser engine around that age (KHTML, which later became WebKit and Blink), and while I don't work in browsers right now, much of that knowledge, mindset and of course the professional network have done much to shape my life. And a fairly successful career, for that matter.
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Historically people lived very different lives, required different skills, were poorer, had different opportunities etc.
A lot of people will make better decisions with a few yeas more maturity, and spending a few years developing themselves.
University will help a lot of people, and for some it will help.
There is a lot more to life than making a living.
Early web didn’t have JS. Nor PHP. In fact a lot of early web pages were written using static HTML with C++ invoked via CGI/bin for processing form data. So writing a browser would teach you the HTML plus C++ too.
The early Internet (which the GP mentioned) didn’t even have the web. But that’s nitpicking.
17 is a weird age but ymmv. I left home at 16 alone to study abroad. I had tons of free time due to dorm curfews and such. Unfortunately, I was too poor to have a computer and the computers we had access to were completely locked up. (Naturally we waltzed past the locks to play some games but it was also under surveillance)
Paradoxically I coded way more between ages 12-14, I regret my wasted late teens.
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I mean... that's actually amazing advice. Not because they would grow up to create browser startups. But because they would grow up to create web startups that succeed because of very fundamental of how the web is rendered.
Which is paulg's point really
This site exists because paulg created a webshop in a niche language (Lisp) and got a prototype bought out (and discarded) in the gold rush. No browser internals needed to make a fortune on the platform. Just rapid development of an application with natural monetization, and being in a place to do so way at the beginning.
Jeff Bezos did similar, but he did his own fulfillment and hired out the coding.
Early internet let me create the best personal web page in my city that I knew of with 2 weeks experience as a 12 year old. I imagine that same 12 year old could be more knowledgeable about LLMs than 99% of people in the same period.
You're vastly over-estimating the difficulty of making a web page and even more vastly under-estimating the difficulty of LLMs.
I doubt it. Creating a website can be done by copy pasting a few snippets together and checking if it visually looks like expected.
Good luck with that approach when trying to toy around with models and their training/inference.
There is also a lot of math basics missing that a 12 year old may be able to grasp, but I would bet they are at least 13 by the time the knowledge is deep enough to understand what operations are happening.