Elon Musk talks during a virtual meeting at the B20 Summit ahead of the G20 leaders summit in Nusa Dua, Bali. Photo / AP
Elon Musk’s Twitter firing spree continues.
The billionaire, whose chaotic US$44 billion takeover of the social media giant continues to make daily headlines, has already aggressively sacked thousands of employees worldwide — about half of Twitter’s workforce.
One staffer who apparently survived the initial purge has now joined the pile — after chiming in to publicly fact-check his boss about the poor performance of the app.
In typical Musk fashion, the drama started with a Tweet.
“Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries,” he wrote on Sunday. “App is doing >1000 poorly batched RPCs (remote procedure calls) just to render a home timeline!”
San Diego-based Twitter developer Eric Frohnhoefer publicly responded to Musk’s tweet, writing, “I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong.”
Musk hit back, “Then please correct me. What is the right number? Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?”
Frohnhoefer responded with a lengthy series of tweets, in which he conceded that “there is plenty of room for performance improvements on Android”.
“However, I don’t think the number of requests is the primary issue,” he said.
“For a cold start of the app there are ~20 requests to load a home timeline. Most of the requests are non-blocking and happen in the background. This includes things like images, user settings, hashflags, etc.”
He continued, “I think there are three reasons the app is 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.”
Frohnhoefer concluded, “Frankly we should probably prioritize some big rewrites to combat 10+ years of tech debt and make a call on deleting features aggressively.”
One Twitter user chimed in, “I have been a developer for 20 years. And I can tell you that as the domain expert here you should inform your boss privately. Trying to one up him in public while he is trying to learn and be helpful makes you look like a spiteful self serving dev.”
Frohnhoefer replied, “Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email.”
On Monday, Musk tweeted simply, “He’s fired.”
Frohnhoefer later posted a photo of his locked Mac screen.
“Guess it is official now,” he wrote.
The developer — who describes himself in his Twitter bio as “San Diegan of the year”, a reference to The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2021 honouring the 2.5 million residents who took Covid vaccines — agreed with one user who commented that “Elon seems like an awful boss to work for”.
“We use to say feedback (is) a gift,” he wrote. “Well, now the gift is unemployment.”
Musk later continued to expound on the app’s performance issues and planned changes in a series of tweets — including revealing that the “sent from iPhone” tag would be removed.
“I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong,” he wrote.
“Same app in US takes ~2 secs to refresh (too long), but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms. Actually useful data transferred is low. Part of today will be turning off the ‘microservices’ bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!”
He added, “And we will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space & compute) below every tweet. Literally no one even knows why we did that …”
The latest row comes after Musk outraged Twitter employees by axing free lunches.
“He fired 3/4 of the employees. Now he’s planning to starve the rest of them. He’s failure incarnate,” a popular tweet responding to his decision read.
Musk fired back a short time later arguing barely any staff fronted up for lunch anyway.
“Especially bizarre given that almost no one came to the office. Estimated cost per lunch served in past 12 months is >$400,” he wrote.
A former employee who claimed she quit Twitter because of Musk, challenged the new CEO on the cost of providing breakfast and lunch for staff.
“This is a lie. I ran this program up until a week ago when I resigned because I didn’t want to work for Elon Musk. For breakfast & lunch we spent $20-$25 a day per person. This enabled employees to work thru lunchtime & mtgs. Attendance was anything from 20-50% in the offices,” she tweeted.
Musk however said the ex staff member was “false” and the company spent “$13M/year on food service for San Francisco headquarters”.
“Badge in records show peak occupancy was 25%, average occupancy below 10%. There are more people preparing breakfast than eating breakfast. They don’t even bother serving dinner, because there is no one in the building,” he replied.
Musk last week reportedly emailed staff telling them they would be expected to be in the office for at least 40 hours a week.
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