At least three Twitter employees who survived the mass layoffs that cut the company’s workforce in half were fired after publicly criticizing their new boss on the platform.
Eric Frohnhoefer is one of them, and he responded to Elon Musk’s tweet apologizing for Twitter’s slowness in many countries.
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“App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!” Musk wrote. Frohnhoefer responded that after six years of working on Twitter for Android, he can say that Musk’s statement “is wrong.”
The multi-company executive then inquired as to what the correct number was and what he had done to fix Twitter for Android, which had been “extremely slow.” He responded with his team’s work on the app and listed a few reasons why it’s 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 several threads, and when one user suggested that Frohnhoefer should have informed his boss privately, he responded: “Perhaps he should ask his questions privately. Slack or email could be used.” Following that, Musk announced on Twitter that Fronhoefer had been fired.
According to Forbes, the former Twitter app engineer received no communication from Twitter regarding his dismissal and that his laptop “just shut off.”
He went on to say that “[n]o one trusts anyone within the company anymore,” making it difficult to function. According to the former Twitter employee, “people were more open and felt they could criticize:
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According to Bloomberg, another engineer named Ben Leib was also fired. Musk’s apology tweet was also met with a response from Leib, who claimed that as a former “tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter,”
their new owner had no idea what he was talking about. Then there’s Sasha Solomon, a company tech lead who responded to Musk’s tweet with her own and later announced that she, too, had been fired.
