Twitter fired employees who publicly called out: Elon Musk
4 min read
At least three Twitter employees who survived the major layoffs that slashed the company's personnel in half were dismissed after publicly criticising their new leader on the network.
At least three Twitter employees who survived the major layoffs that slashed the company’s personnel in half were dismissed after publicly criticising their new leader on the network. Eric Frohnhoefer is one of them, and he responded to Elon Musk’s post apologising for Twitter’s slowness in several countries.
“The app is performing over 1000 badly batched RPCs only to render the home timeline!” Musk penned a letter. Frohnhoefer said that Musk’s assertion is “false” after six years of working on Twitter for Android.
The multi-company executive then asked him what the correct number was and what he had done to fix Twitter for Android, which had been “super slow.” He responded with the work his team had done for the app and listed a few reasons why it was slow: “First, it’s bloated with features that get little usage. Second, we have accumulated years of tech debt as we have traded velocity and features over perf. Third, we spend a lot of time waiting for network responses.”
Their conversation continued in multiple threads, and when one person suggested that Frohnhoefer should have notified his boss quietly, he responded, “Maybe he should ask questions discreetly. Maybe via Slack or email.” After that, Musk informed everyone on Twitter that Fronhoefer had been fired.
According to Forbes, the former Twitter app engineer received no notification from Twitter regarding his firing and that his laptop “simply shut off.” He went on to say that “[n]o one trusts anyone within the firm anymore,” making it difficult to perform. According to the former Twitter employee, “people were more open and thought they could critique before Musk took control, and now that’s definitely not the case.”
According to Bloomberg, another engineer named Ben Leib was also sacked. Musk’s apology tweet was also met with a response from Leib, who said that as a former “tech head for timelines infrastructure at Twitter,” their new owner had no idea what he was talking about. Then there’s Sasha Solomon, a business tech lead who responded to Musk’s tweet with her own and later claimed that she, too, had been sacked.
Twitter has seen significant adjustments since Elon Musk officially purchased the company. He quickly fired its senior executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, and ordered mass layoffs that resulted in the dismissal of roughly half of the social network’s staff. Twitter also debuted the $8-per-month Blue membership, which gave everyone who could afford it access to quick verification. However, making the blue checkmark easy to achieve resulted in an increase in impersonation and legitimate-looking fraudulent accounts on the platform.
Since Musk took over late last month, Twitter has been in disarray. Many employees are still furious that Musk sacked half of the company’s 7,000-plus employees, including the majority of senior management, within a week of his $44 billion buyout.
The billionaire also quickly altered corporate culture. While it was not previously common for employees to publicly challenge leadership at Twitter, employees frequently spoke out on internal Slack channels and via email before Musk arrived, sometimes posting criticism or concerns to the entire company.
According to current and former employees, Musk’s changes have resulted in a lack of communication internally about who is in charge and what the company’s priorities are.
The changes have also raised concerns that Twitter, based in San Francisco, is vulnerable to product failures or technical outages. Twitter implemented another coding freeze on Monday, halting app product updates, with no explanation given to employees.
Employee firings have also sparked a barrage of jokes emphasising Musk’s termination streak since taking over Twitter in October. Elon Musk has fired more than half of the company’s personnel, and Twitter began terminating contractual employees last weekend. He is believed to have terminated the services of over 4,400 contractual employees. The whole contractual workforce numbered 5,500 people.
News Headlines: Elon Musk: ‘I have too much work on my plate’
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