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by badminton1 3542 days ago
But ask yourself: how does your browser layout engine and scripting engine work? Is CSS some sort of self-hosting language that just materialized out of nowhere? Or there's somewhere a group of people responsible for it? (e.g: Google's Chromium team, Mozilla's Firefox team, Apple's Safari team, Microsoft's Edge team, etc.) Those people DO need to know data structures.

For you to be able to focus on CSS, HTML and JavaScript, someone, somewhere needs to make CSS, HTML and JavaScript work for you in the first place.
1 comments
fail2fail2ban 3542 days ago
> But ask yourself: how does your browser layout engine and scripting engine work?

[But ask yourself: how does your car's engine work?]

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badminton1 3542 days ago
My point is: he can focus on HTML, CSS and JavaScript all he wants, and remain abstracted from internals. That's fine.

But here we are talking about one of the companies responsible for implementing such technologies, where the science he implies as not being very relevant IS relevant.

It's the difference between applying to a truck driver work, to a truck engine designer work. For the latter, knowing the theory of an internal combustion engine IS relevant.

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theli0nheart 3542 days ago
> My point is: he can focus on HTML, CSS and JavaScript all he wants, and remain abstracted from internals. That's fine.

The majority of engineering positions that Google hires for are exactly this. The Chrome / Chromium team is just one team at Google. Most of the engineers who work there are building/scaling iOS apps, web apps, and are doing the exact same work that I do all day long.

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pjlegato 3542 days ago
A better analogy would be hiring engine designers by spending 90% of the interview asking them questions about low level metallurgy, and 10% about engine design as such. I would reverse those ratios.
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Ar-Curunir 3542 days ago
A lot more people do stuff that interacts with the details of the browser engine than they do that interacts with the car engine; much more common (and easier) to find bugs in the browser engine than in your car engine.

Now if I was just browsing the internet, then, sure, your analogy might be more apt. But that's not what we're doing.

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