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).
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.
Obviously there are many problems in the web world that are just as hard as problems in the game world. Some of them are even the same problems.
But having done both, making any game beyond the absolute most basic game in Unity is harder than what 95% of web developers do day to day.
I’m currently in web dev because it pays so much better, but game dev really is more technically challenging than most web dev.
It’s hard to compare average skill levels between the 2 because so many people are drawn to games because they love them and to the web because of the pay. But if I had to guess, I’d put my money on there being a significantly higher floor for game dev.
Sure, I also think game dev is more challenging than frontend webdev (and definitely more challenging than BUA MVC CRUD-fests on the backend), but IMHO any safety-critical[0] shit is simply where things start to get serious, though maybe it gets less challenging because most of it is paperwork, and if it works you are pretty sure it keeps working. All of this was also true of government, until quite recently.
[0] Which Musk maybe have heard of given he has a bit of experience lurking around automotive tech.
It is wrong to compare games and websites. What you should really compare is browser engines and game engines, and the former obviously requires much more effort and expertise to develop, so it is definitely not wrong to say that game developers (game engine developers) are better developers than web developers (browser engine developers).
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.
I agree, but the core reason for this has nothing to do with either of the points you mention. There are few other sub-cultures that come anywhere close to the (avg.) level of passion and narrow focus than game dev. And you absolutely need it, because it is very complex and usually badly paid.
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.
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.
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.