Elon Musk said he fired a Twitter engineer whose only fault was publicly denying the billionaire’s diagnosis of the application’s technical shortcomings.
It’s not good to be a Twitter employee right now. After laying off half of his employees worldwide in early November, Elon Musk recently reiterated the operation by cutting staff related to moderation, marketing and real estate. And this Monday, November 14, the whimsical billionaire said on Twitter that he had fired Eric Frohnhoefer, an engineer who worked for the social network. His wrong? Having denied the claims of the owner of Tesla who, in a tweet, regretted that the Android version of the social network is “super slow in many countries”. According to him, a situation due to the fact that the application was poorly coded.
Eric Frohnhoefer responded to Elon Musk’s tweet saying the comments were simply untrue. While admitting that there was “room for performance improvements on Android”, the engineer, who says he worked for six years on this version of the application, publicly disputed Elon Musk’s diagnosis on cause of speed issues. According to him, these slowdowns are particularly related to the fact that the application consists of many features that few people use. A phenomenon that leads to a decrease in fluidity.
“He is fired”
As a solution, Frohnhoefer suggested that Twitter remove old features while avoiding adding new ones. During the exchange, many users of the platform pointed out that Mr. Frohnhoefer was likely putting himself in danger by publicly correcting the new owner of Twitter. These warnings have proven to be accurate. Indeed, this Monday, November 14, Elon Musk laconically announced on Twitter the dismissal of the engineer.
The latter was content to respond ironically with an emoji.
Throughout his exchange with Elon Musk, Mr Frohnhoefer hinted that he had many alternatives if he had to quit Twitter. He pointed out that his LinkedIn profile had “never been so popular” and that he had also received a message from a Reddit developer who suggested that he come and work with him for the platform in question.