Comment by rsynnott
5 months ago
This is about the level of Musk's understanding of tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12519729
Games are written for Windows, therefore webapps should be written with "Microsoft C++" (presumably meaning Visual C++, though I suppose there's an outside chance that he means "Microsoft C/C++", from the early 90s).
He's not new to being... bad at this.
Reading that set of quotes, it really is incredible how little Musk knows about even extremely basic things. He doesn't understand there are different problem spaces in tech, and that different problem spaces require completely different approaches and skill sets. To him, something like World of Warcraft is very impressive, so if you build Paypal on the same technology it will be impressive too. Like, honestly it's shocking that this guy is allowed near anything that has a button.
He sounds like Dilbert's boss...
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...
Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1995-11-17>
Yeah, I mean that archetype exists for a reason.
The "games programmers are best programmers, in all senses" thing is a very, very common point of layperson confusion; not totally sure why.
(As someone who has worked in both the games industry and Big Tech(tm), yeah, no.)
Because a game looks hard. Forms look easy. Website? Even a phone can run a website, but a game requires that beefy big box!
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I do think that game companies have a higher percentage of top-tier programmers. This is both due to pedigree and size of the field.
There are some incredible programmers in both big tech and game dev, but big tech has vastly more developers with less pressure to have top-tier talent.
Median developer at both probably represents the same skill because of normal distributions.
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He's deeply autistic. It's a thing they tend to do.
Having never read that - it reads incredibly similar to how Trump talks but with better sentence structure. It all sounds believable, but it’s really useless platitudes.
Developer tools, along with availability of developers, was probably the number one reason to have chosen a Microsoft stack around the year 2000.
The annoyances of IIS were borne by sysadmins, but your developers were probably able to be more productive.
It's all very bullshit-ese, but it's worth pointing out that the majority of Google's important backend services are written in C++ (on Linux though). And not just stuff written in that same era, but all the way up to about 5-10 years ago.
Granted: Google was not so dumb to imagine deploying on NT / IIS. And their reasons for doing C++ were nothing like what Musk is blathering about here.
The biggest issue here isn't even about the technology. It's Musk as management stepping outside of his domain trying to tell the professionals working under him exactly what to do... because he's an egomaniac narcissist.