> 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!

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.