Elon Musk fired a Twitter employee... on Twitter. (Wait till you hear what his fault was)
Just when you thought the new Twitter head-honcho's firing spree had come to a close, Elon Musk never ceases to amaze, laying off yet another one of the platform's employees. This time, over a tweet; and on Twitter.
Following the chaotic week of patches and updates Twitter has had, desperately trying to get its new Twitter Blue subscription model to function properly, Musk tweeted an apology citing “>1,000 poorly batched RPCs” as the reason for Twitter being slow in many countries.
Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022
An Android developer at the micro-blogging platform, Eric Frohnhoefer, later responded to Musk’s tweet, claiming his boss was just flat out wrong...
...which of course, did not sit well with the Big Boss, who then proceeded to call out Frohnhoefer over a tweet, asking him why Twitter has been so laggy over Android, on his watch (the playground equivalent of “if you’re so smart, why haven’t you fixed the problem?”)
Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2022
To which, Frohnhoefer did not seem to back down, offering a detailed explanation of what he believes is actually the cause of Twitter running so slow...
We have done a bunch of work to improve performance and we found that it correlates well with increasing UAM and Ad spend. Agree, there is plenty of room for performance improvements on Android. However, I don’t think the number of requests is the primary issue.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
I think there are three reasons the app is 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.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
Frankly we should probably prioritize some big rewrites to combat 10+ years of tech debt and make a call on deleting features aggressively.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
Ohh it's slow on iOS too. I can just speak to Android better since that is my area of expertise. Android and iOS would experience the same network latency.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
As the tweet thread expanded in debate, a random user chipped in, asking Musk if wanted a person like Frohnhoefer’s kind of attitude on his team. Naturally, Musk responded promptly:
He’s fired
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2022
Frohnhoefer took to Twitter to make the suspicions around the termination of his employment official. It took roughly five hours for the company to disable his access to his company-issued laptop.
Guess it is official now. pic.twitter.com/5SRwotyD8J
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
The San Diegan developer seems to be taking things rather well currently. In the hours since his firing from the company, the tweet thread hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, with users offering help and some good laughs following his sacking…
Thanks. But at this point I won't be buying beer for a long time.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 15, 2022
Go for it.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 15, 2022
Complete the special project by Friday or you are fired. LOL. JK. You are being laid off Thursday night. Super motivating.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 15, 2022
Uggh. Didn't work.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 15, 2022
🤏
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 15, 2022
We should start a club.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 15, 2022
my fully remote team at @Square for Restaurants is looking for iOS & Android engineers of all experience levels!
— James Saeed (@j_t_saeed) November 14, 2022
if you're interested, feel free to DM me! and also feel free to retweet for visibility in this tough job market :)
Thank you.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
Thank. My LinkedIn account has never been more popular.
— Eric Frohnhoefer @ 🏡 (@EricFrohnhoefer) November 14, 2022
Meanwhile, Musk himself seems to remain unsurprisingly unfazed by this situation, continuing on in the thread trying to justify his argument…
I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2022
Same app in US takes ~2 secs to refresh (too long), but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms. Actually useful data transferred is low.
And we will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space & compute) below every tweet. Literally no one even knows why we did that …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 14, 2022
In the weeks since his arrival, Twitter Boss Musk has
- fired over 3,700 people in Week 2 of him taking over Twitter (and then called some of them back)
- fired the top senior executives at Twitter
- fired more than 5,000 contractual employees at Twitter without any notice, and
- stopped all remaining employees from working from home.