Three Twitter employees were recently fired after getting involved in a controversy with Elon Musk. The controversy, in particular, followed a tweet by the company’s new owner, in which he apologized for Twitter’s slow performance in many countries and offered his own explanation for it.
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
One of the fired employees is Eric Fraunhofer, who, after six years at Twitter for Android, said Musk’s statement was “wrong.”
The businessman asked him what was right and what he did to fix the bugs in “Supernel” Twitter for Android, after which the engineer talked about the work done by his team and named several reasons for the application’s slowdown.
“First, it’s full of features that few use. Also, it’s accumulated years of technical debt because we’ve traded performance for speed and features. Finally, it takes a long time to wait for network responses,” Frohnhofer explained.
The controversy continued in several threads, and when one user advised Fraunhofer to give the boss the information face-to-face, he replied: “Maybe he should ask questions in person. Even using Slack or email.” Musk notified Twitter users of Fraunhofer’s firing afterward (and later apparently deleted his own tweet).
As the former Twitter application engineer later told Forbes, he had not received any notice of dismissal from Twitter. He noted that “no one in the company trusts each other anymore” and it’s difficult to operate, and before Musk bought the company “people were more open and felt they could criticize, but now it’s really not like that”.
According to Bloomberg, engineer Ben Leib was also fired. He also responded to Musk’s same tweet and said that the new owner of the company has no idea what he is talking about. As Elon Musk later learned, he was followed by Sasha Solomon, the company’s technical leader, who also commented on Musk’s tweet.
lol just got fired for shitposting
i said it before and i'll say it again
kiss my ass elon ????
— sachee@macaw.social (@sachee) November 15, 2022
It should be noted that the acquisition of the company by a businessman brought a number of changes to Twitter. He immediately fired key executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal, and then began mass layoffs that saw half of the workforce laid off.
Twitter users have also been given the option of a Blue subscription, which costs $8 a month and allows people to instantly verify their identity with a blue “√” sign. Because it’s so easy to obtain, cases of impersonating someone else’s keys on the platform and the number of fake accounts have increased.
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