Several people have criticized Musk’s tweet about Twitter’s underperformance. One of them seems to have quit his job. Twitter has seen thousands of layoffs, departures and resignations since Elon Musk took office, but one of the most recent personnel changes appears to have been personal: The company’s new CEO tweeted that Eric Frohnhoefer, an employee who had publicly discussed with him on the platform, had been fired.
The Saga of Elon Musk
The saga began Sunday when Musk tweeted an apology for Twitter’s slowness in “many countries,” suggesting that poor performance was due to the app making more than 1,000 “misgrouped” remote procedure calls to load the launch timeline, basically saying the app is communicating with other servers multiple times. and has to wait for a response for each request. Frohnhoefer, who tweeted that he had worked on Twitter for Android for six years, cited Musk’s statement that it was false. Musk has said the same thing several times in response to News about his companiesdone, but unlike those cases, Frohnhöfer actually provided an explanation for why he thought his boss’s tweet was wrong.
According to Frohnhoefer, Twitter actually doesn’t make remote procedure calls or RPCs. Instead, he says, when the app starts, it makes about 20 requests in the background. Apparently to clarify his original tweet, Musk replied, “The fact that you don’t know that there are up to 1200 ‘microservices’ that are called when someone uses the Twitter app is not good.” Frohnhoefer again disagreed, tweetingthat the “number required to generate the start timeline is closer to 200 than 1200.”
The conversation between Musk and Frohnhöfer is chaotic, spread over many threads and hours (which,ironically, makes Twitter difficult to see and follow). At one point, Musk asked Frohnhoefer what he personally did to fix Twitter’s inertia on Android, though he recalls that the conversation began with Musk’s apology for slowness in “many countries,” not Android. But Musk’s seemingly final word on the matter came in response to a discussion about whether Frohnhoefer should have voiced his concerns about the original tweet privately on Slack, rather than calling Musk publicly. A commentator in the thread said Musk probably didn’t want Frohnhoefer on his team after the developer tweeted that Musk should have privately asked questions about slowness issues, to which Musk replied, “He’s fired.”
is fired
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 14. November 2022
Frohnhoefer did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on whether Twitter’s human resources team had contacted him or whether he had heard more than Musk’s tweet. Musk, his direct messages, emails, and mentions usually turn into a disaster (it’s worth noting that if you have a public dispute with), you haven’t heard any formal information about his firing from the company.
The Conversation
We also tweeted Musk to comment, as Twitter no longer has a communications department.
Musk has faced headwinds from others over his tweet, including other Twitter employees. Sasha Solomon, who identifies asTwitter’s technology leader, quoted him and retweeted him, saying, “Not only did he fire almost all the infrastructure and then make a blatant comment about how we do batch processing.” He also accused Musk of not knowing how GraphQL works and not knowing how Twitter’s infrastructure works.
On Monday night, Solomon tweeted, “lol just got fired for posting shit.” Her thread doesn’t mention whether Musk fired her directly, and he doesn’t seem to have responded to her tweetscriticizing him as he did with Frohnhöfer.
Commentators outside the company have also questioned the tweet. Musk says he got the RPC information from several Twitter engineers and said, “The former employee is wrong.”
If Musk was really wrong about how Twitter works, it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve dived immediately on Sunday. he tweeted that the site is “by far the biggest driver of clicks on the internet,” a statement that almost anyone who owns a website knows how powerful Google and Facebook are. Twitter users also used Birdwatch, a featurethat allows you to point out misinformation on the site, to correct Musk. (It wasn’t the first time they’ve observed it in birds as well; there’s also a correction note underneath. of his tweet about the price of insulin). He later deleted the tweet.
As for the consequences of the dispute, Musk has announced that at least one feature, the tags indicating which device or app posted a tweet from, will be removed in the name of performance. So far, Musk has not responded to Frohnhöfer’s other suggestions to improve performance, including reducing unnecessary features and overhauling systems that hinder enforcement.
As for Frohnhöfer himself, he tweeted that it was “definitely stupid” to confront Musk the way he did, though he doesn’t seem too worried about getting fired. They have already been encouraged to apply for jobs in other companies.
