"Seibel: Do you have any advice for self-taught programmers? Fitzpatrick: Always try to do something a little harder, that’s outside your reach."

His interview in Coders at Work was one of my favorites.

Agreed. When it started off I felt he came off a bit .. brash but by the time I finished reading through the interview I really enjoyed his thoughts and him in general.

Mine as well. It seemed very intense. I could imagine him sitting there, hardly able to sit still.

The accomplishments of all the interviewees in the book are very impressive and very informative.

"In practice, nothing works." Nice quote, but it would have worked better preceded by "In theory, everything works." :-)

" I think it’s really important to know the whole stack even if you don’t operate within the whole stack."

Another nice quote. Especially if you're hiring.

True, but reading job interview questions, it seems to me that whether or not they require applicants to know the whole stack is one issue. How they think they can find that out is an entirely different and much more difficult issue.

If you really wanto to "go low level", I can recommend to write progs for NES(6502)/Genesis(68000) - the hardware is simple, processor - simple, and there is a plenty of open source emulators which are in fact a great documentation for target machine.

Modern PC's unfortunately are so complicated...