Comment by paulryanrogers
11 hours ago
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.
Sorry if I was unclear. I mean they'll never have enough time to learn a significant amount of modern web tech because they'll be working up to it from lower layers and basics.
Browsers from scratch are multi-year projects for multiple people. Even just skinning and minor tweaks to modern browsers is a deep well for one person.
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.
You'd hire an auto designer to be a limo driver? I think it's just two different skill sets. The auto designer is clearly smart but a limo driver also needs to have customer service skills, etc.
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
I think he's saying that building a browser is not a transferrable skill, like making a generic web page is. Employers don't like specialists. I used to build display drivers for graphics cards. Wonderful learning opportunity but other employers not in the graphics card manufacturing business didn't give a shit--those three years were essentially treated as an employment gap. "Well that's nice, but we really wish you had general experience writing CRUD apps..."
> I think he's saying that building a browser is not a transferrable skill, like making a generic web page is. Employers don't like specialists.
I recently switched roles, and among the seven places I interviewed, none of them seemed to see my then-current browser job as a problem, even though they were not related to browsers. (The closest one was a company implementing a HTTP reverse proxy, and I did not work on the browser's HTTP stack.)
I would argue that in a post-LLM world, becoming as specialized as possible is the only way to survive. If you have the serious systems programming skills required to write graphics drivers, your talent would be wasted writing CRUD apps anyway. I hope you eventually found/will find something more appropriate for your skillset!
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CRUD didn’t exist in the early days of the web.
People keep talking about a browser in the modern context but the GP specifically said “early days of the internet” (which, in fairness, would mean pre-web. But I think it’s safe to assume they meant “web” not Internet).
In those days, it was actually a much simpler exercise to write a browser than it is today. I even wrote one! And writing a browser absolutely teaches you how HTTP and HTML worked. Plus a lot of backed development was forms data sent to CGI and thus written in languages we wouldn’t even dream of using for web development nowadays, including C++.
So in the early web, writing a browser absolutely was a transferable skill. It might not be now, but in the context defined by the GP, it was.
But building a web browser isn't a niche skill - it requires a whole bunch of them. You need to be a generalist to write a web browser.
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