At least three employees of Twitter who got to keep their jobs during the massive layoffs, which reduced the company's workforce into half, have now been fired for calling out their new boss on the platform.
One of them is Eric Frohnhoefer, who responded to Musk's tweet apologizing for Twitter being slow in many countries. "App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!" Musk had tweeted. Frohnhoefer replied that after six years of working on Twitter for Android, he can say that Musk's statement "is wrong."
Musk then asked him what the right number was and what has he done to fix Twitter for Android, which has been "super slow." He replied with the work his team has done for the app and told a few reasons on why it's slow.
Their exchange went on in several threads, and when one user told Frohnhoefer that he should've informed his boss privately, he said: "Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email." After that, Musk informed everyone on Twitter that Fronhoefer had been fired.
The former Twitter app engineer told the media that he had gotten no communication from Twitter about his dismissal and that his laptop "just shut off." He added that "[n]o one trusts anyone within the company anymore," so it's been hard to function. The former Twitter employee also said that before Musk took over, "people were more open and felt that they could criticize and now that's clearly not the case."
Another engineer named Ben Leib was also fired, as per reports. Leib also responded to the same apology tweet by Musk, commenting that as a former "tech lead for timelines infrastructure at Twitter," their new owner had no idea what he was talking about. And then there's Sasha Solomon, a tech lead for the company who chimed in with her own response to the same Musk tweet and who later said that she had also got the marching orders.
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