Elon Musk fires Twitter engineer for arguing with him publicly

[midian182]

What just happened? Elon Musk continued his rampage through Twitter yesterday by firing one of the company's engineers who made the mistake of arguing with his boss publicly. The now former employee, who spent six years working on Twitter for Android, called out a statement from Musk for being wrong. Following a back-and-forth between the two over the course of several hours, Musk posted a now-deleted tweet that read, "He's fired."

The incident began on Sunday when Musk tweeted an apology for Twitter being super slow in many countries. The CEO blamed this on the app performing over 1,000 "poorly batched" remote procedure calls (RPCs) to load a home timeline.

One of the replies to Musk's tweet came from Eric Frohnhoefer, a Twitter employee working on the Android version of the app. "I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong," he wrote.

I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong. https://t.co/sh30ZxpD0N

— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 13, 2022

Frohnhoefer said that Twitter doesn't make any RPCs, adding that it makes around 20 background requests when the app starts up instead. Musk responded with, "The fact that you don't realize that there are up to 1200 'microservices' being called when someone uses the Twitter app is not great."

Seemingly not wanting to back down, Frohnhoefer said the number to generate the home timeline is closer to 200 than 1200.

The pair continued to interact with each other over the course of many hours, during which time Musk seemed to grow more irate. "Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?" he asked Frohnhoefer.

When the developer tweeted that Musk should have asked questions about Twitter's slow performance privately, a commentator in the thread wrote that Musk probably doesn't want Frohnhoefer on his team. "He's Fired," wrote the world's richest man, to which Frohnhoefer responded with a saluting emoji.

Frohnhoefer, who had been with Twitter for eight years, told Forbes that it took around five hours for Twitter to lock him out of his company-issued laptop. He told the publication that he'd received no formal communication from the company about his dismissal. "They're all a bunch of cowards," Frohnhoefer said.

"No one trusts anyone within the company anymore," Frohnhoefer explained. "How can you function? Employees don't trust the new management. Management doesn't trust the employees. How do you think you're supposed to get anything done? That's why there's production freezes – you can't merge code, you can't turn things on without permission from VPs."

Some people have criticized Frohnhoefer for calling out Musk's apparent mistake in a very public way, warning that he has likely done irreparable harm to his career. But he appears to have already been offered another job at Reddit.

Eric, this thread is absolutely bonkers. We're hiring senior and staff Android engineers at Reddit. We won't treat you like this.

— Jameson (@softwarejameson) November 14, 2022

Another employee, Sasha Solomon, whose bio lists her as tech lead/staff software engineer at Twitter, retweeted Musk's original post, writing, "you did not just layoff almost all of infra and then make some sassy remark about how we do batching. like did you bother to even learn how graphql works" On Monday, Solomon tweeted that she had been fired for shitposting. It appears that Musk never responded to her tweets directly.

just because some dipshit doesn't understand what we built doesn't make it (or us) any less awesome

— sachee@macaw.social (@sachee) November 15, 2022

Several others outside of Twitter's ranks have also called Musk's statement into question, though he seems to be sticking with it. But maybe he will learn more about the platform's systems now that he's sleeping at Twitter HQ until the company is "fixed."

Technical folks look at it and say "lol, that's BS, if it were 1000 RPCs on load, the home screen would take minutes to load" and maybe immediately go check to see that, yes, the number is much smaller

— @Pwnallthethings@mastodon.social (@pwnallthethings) November 14, 2022

Musk has just come off another online spat, this one with Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. The politician told the billionaire to fix his companies or "congress will."

Check out this roundup of all that happened at Twitter last week, from bankruptcy warnings to turning the platform into a payment processor.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/96653-elon-musk-fires-twitter-engineer-arguing-publicly.html

 

[NumberSix]

Manchild Musk strikes again.

 

[dualkelly]

Almost as bad as Trump. Thin skinned bloviated rich kid trying to get back at the world because he was hated in high school or something... most likely seething away at the world thinking I will show them. The awesome thing is every time he acts more like a dip shite the more advertisers pull the funds. Bet he believes his own hype that is he is some genius haha king twit for the win.

 

[dangh]

That's a small d**k energy.
He thought that if he can treat people like slaves in a car company he can do same with high-tech specialists.

 

[dualkelly]

Odd one cant delete one's own comment lol

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

To be fair, I don’t think I’d ever publicly disagree with my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, especially outside work on a huge forum where my full name is on my profile. I’m not sure what would happen to my job if someone noticed lmao.

Odd one cant delete one's own comment lol

Yeah the best you can do is go to the forum side and report your own post including a comment to delete it: https://www.techspot.com/community/...ngineer-for-arguing-with-him-publicly.277886/

 

[dualkelly]

To be fair, I don’t think I’d ever publicly disagree with my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss, especially outside work on a huge forum where my full name is on my profile. I’m not sure what would happen to my job if someone noticed lmao.

Yeah the best you can do is go to the forum side and report your own post including a comment to delete it: https://www.techspot.com/community/...ngineer-for-arguing-with-him-publicly.277886/

Yeah I accidently replied to my own comment when I was trying to edit it.

 

[OortCloud]

Elon Musk - bellend

 

[Dimitriid]

I think it's more fair to say he defended his 6 years of working on the app to some ridiculously sensitive billionaire that feels compelled to just criticize his development team publicly in the first place instead of, as he suggested, demanding answers from them privately through internal channels instead.

And given the result of 2FA sms being taken down immediately after this series of events I say is with good reason.

Honestly just think about it: the entire tech industry knows Twitter right now is a sinking ship that's also on fire as well and even if you weren't immediately fired there's no reason for you to even attempt at continuing your IT career in there at this time. You could put in your 2 weeks, get no compensation for quitting and have to live with being expected to just let someone else know everything you worked for so they can take credit and profit from it...

...Or you could exploit the man-baby that's having the most public mid-life crisis implosion in recorded history over his ex-wife leaving him for a trans woman, And bait him to fire you: get benefits and a lot of tech start ups to notice you: I would basically take all the screen caps and send it in as my resume and I think it would actually work.

 

[AMN3S1AC]

Not much of a resume.....worked for a company that continually lost money, developed apps that are slow and bloated, argued with boss on a public forum.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I love all the people here bovating about how terrible musk is here, forgetting that most employers (including their own) have social media policies that would allow them to fire said employees for doing this exact thing. You dont take office arguments onto social media. Period.

 

[NumberSix]

I love all the people here bovating about how terrible musk is here, forgetting that most employers (including their own) have social media policies that would allow them to fire said employees for doing this exact thing. You dont take office arguments onto social media. Period.

If only he didn't have a track record eh?

 

[AlaskaGuy]

If only he didn't have a track record eh?

Here's a list of companies that won't fire you if you go at it with your boss on the companies social media site.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

If only he didn't have a track record eh?

That's some fine whataboutism. Track records dont matter, you violate policy and argue with your boss, publicly, on social media, your *** is grass.

People need to stop assigning blame based on political orientation, seriously.

 

[cristianm]

If the company was thriving and it were a smooth experience, then maybe it was right to argue. But the guy seems to argue about terminology and not actual performance.
- Is it slow?
- yes
- does the home page (screen, feed whatever you call it) aggregates a lot of data from a lot of places?
- yes (200 vs 1000 is still a lot)
- does the thing in general use a lot of resources?
- probably yes (they spend way more than they earn)
- Does it matter whether the owner masters the tech terms (rpc, microservice) or not?
- I doubt it, it's not his job to implement it, but in order to fix the business they need to also fix the tech.

So I see a lot of ppl at twitter defending their way of doing things, but the results are not in their favor, because they seem to have created an expensive and slow service.

 

[Ohnooze]

Well you don't call your boss out publicly. That's what happens. Musk may or may not be an a-hole but if you want to keep your job that's just not what you do.
It's one thing to go to him directly and make your case it's another to try and call him out publicly to make that case. Sorry but this guy asked to be fired imo.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

If the company was thriving and it were a smooth experience, then maybe it was right to argue. But the guy seems to argue about terminology and not actual performance.
- Is it slow?
- yes
- does the home page (screen, feed whatever you call it) aggregates a lot of data from a lot of places?
- yes (200 vs 1000 is still a lot)
- does the thing in general use a lot of resources?
- probably yes (they spend way more than they earn)
- Does it matter whether the owner masters the tech terms (rpc, microservice) or not?
- I doubt it, it's not his job to implement it, but in order to fix the business they need to also fix the tech.

So I see a lot of ppl at twitter defending their way of doing things, but the results are not in their favor, because they seem to have created an expensive and slow service.

Dont forget: last year twitter's R+D budget was a whopping $1.5 BILLION, with absolutely nothing to show for it. This company had 7500 employees, and according to twitter's badge records at best 25% of staff showed up, usually the number was in the single digits.

The Twitter employees screeching for the world to see are the ones that got 6-7 figure salaries based on who they knew, cushy do nothing jobs that are now being trimmed so twitter stops losing money, and BOY are they mad about that.

 

[GoldenGoat]

I get the feeling this guy had no plans or interest to stay at Twitter.

 

[m4a4]

I get the feeling this guy had no plans or interest to stay at Twitter.

Yeah. Sounds like he was floating his resume around before this.

But man, it is hilarious that the worst social media site where all people do is ****post was where he ****posted and got himself fired. Just haaaad to correct someone (the Chief Twit) on the site where he worked lol

 

[PEnnn]

I love how the Trump crowd supports Musk's stupidity and spoiled man-child actions because...........he's just like that Orange-Haired buffoon!!

What a train wreck. The dog was chasing the car, now he caught it he doesn't know what to do with, it except pick up fights due to his total social media technology ignorance!!

All he knows about Twitter is how to post snarky BS.

 

[dangh]

Here's a list of companies that won't fire you if you go at it with your boss on the companies social media site.

Here is list of companies where boss criticised their product and programmers on social media sites:
Twitter
end.

 

[cristianm]

Here is list of companies where boss criticised their product and programmers on social media sites:
Twitter
end.

How I see it is he admitted the problems and provided a bit of insight (probably not the most accurate from the technical perspective). Wrong or right, I believe the first step in fixing a problem is admitting it exists. The devs seem to believe it does not exist or has other causes.I did not see them point to the cause, only defending their part.

 

[Tran Bronstein]

Elon Musk is a complete tool who has no idea how to actually run a company. He was forced to buy Twitter because of his own trolling and he is now being exposed as a result. I'm boggled that he got this far, but the emperor is about to be exposed as having no clothes. Expect Tesla and SpaceX to follow suit once Twitter gets run into the ground.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I can't wait to see Musk fall on his stupid face.

 

[Ohnooze]

I love how the Trump crowd supports Musk's stupidity and spoiled man-child actions because...........he's just like that Orange-Haired buffoon!!

What a train wreck. The dog was chasing the car, now he caught it he doesn't know what to do with, it except pick up fights due to his total social media technology ignorance!!

All he knows about Twitter is how to post snarky BS.

Why must you bring Trump into everything?
And you just assume that because they have a different view than you then they are Trump supporters by default. I always thought that Trump derangement syndrome was a joke but....