Brad Fitzpatrick, born in 1980, started to learn programming at the age of 5. In high school he went on to create a voting booth script called FreeVote, which he says earned him as much as 27 cent per click on banner ads back then (making for 25, 27 grand per month). He went on to create blogging platform LiveJournal, thinking and implementing a lot to scale this to the traffic needs, and is currently working at Google. The following excerpt is from the book Coders at Work, in which Peter Seibel – himself a programmer – interviews many interesting programmers (some of them working at Google), asking a whole lot of interesting questions.

Seibel: You’ve done a lot of work in Perl, which is a pretty high-level language. How low do you think programmers need to go – do programmers still need to know assembly and how chips work?

Fitzpatrick: I don’t know. I see people that are really smart – I would say they’re good programmers – but say they only know Java. The way they think about solving things is always within the space they know. They don’t think ends-to-end