‘Bunch of cowards’: Fired Twitter engineer blasts Elon Musk, company
A Twitter employee who was fired by tweet after criticizing Elon Musk ripped the billionaire and his advisers as a “bunch of cowards” — hours before the billionaire canned nearly two dozen other workers amid a brewing insurrection.
Former Twitter software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer received a public pink slip Monday after he engaged in a war of words with Musk on the platform.
The dispute began after Musk tweeted an apology on Sunday “for Twitter being super slow in many countries” and attributed the problem to poor app function.
Fronhoefer refuted Musk’s assertion.
“I have spent ~6yrs working on Twitter for Android and can say this is wrong,” Frohnhoefer replied to Musk in a tweet that has received more than 133,000 likes since it was posted.
“Then please correct me. What is the right number?” Musk responded. “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?”
Frohnhoefer fired back with a lengthy thread explaining his view on Twitter’s slow performance.
“I think there are three reasons the app is slow,” Frohnhoefer said. “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.”
Musk did not respond to the thread, but later confirmed he had axed Frohnhoefer with a two-word tweet: “he’s fired.” The Twitter CEO has since deleted the post.
By Monday night, Frohnhoefer had posted a photo showing he had been locked out of his company laptop.
“Guess it is official now,” he added.
When reached by Forbes for comment, Frohnhoefer said he had received zero communication from Twitter about his firing before his computer was locked.
“Nope, nothing,” he said. “They’re all a bunch of cowards.”
The Post has reached out to Frohnhoefer and Twitter for comment.
Frohnhoefer wasn’t the only Twitter employee to be ousted for standing up to the new boss. Platformer’s Casey Newton reported that “around 20 people” were fired early Tuesday by email after criticizing Musk’s leadership on internal Slack channels.
“We regret to inform you that your employment is terminated immediately,” a message to the fired employees reportedly said. “Your recent behavior has violated company policy.”
Another of the fired workers, software engineer Yao Yue, had “pushed back on Musk’s tweets blaming performance issues on Twitter’s architecture,” according to Newton.
“After 12 amazing years and 3 weeks of chaos, I’m officially fired by Twitter,” the fired engineer wrote on Twitter. “Never expected I would have stayed this long, and never expected I would be this relieved to be gone.”
Musk thinned the already skeletal ranks after cutting about half of Twitter’s 7,500-employee workforce in a bid to trim costs at the struggling social media site after completing his $44 billion takeover.
He has also ended Twitter’s remote work policy and nixed free lunches that he claimed were costing the company $13 million per year.
Frohnhoefer had worked at Twitter for about eight years prior to his dismissal, according to his LinkedIn page. His role was listed as “staff software engineer.”
The ousted engineer told Forbes that Twitter has “gone downhill” since Musk bought the company in October.
“No one trusts anyone within the company anymore,” Frohnhoefer said. “How can you function? Employees don’t trust the new management. Management doesn’t trust the employees. How do you think you’re supposed to get anything done? That’s why there’s production freezes – you can’t merge code, you can’t turn things on without permission from VPs.”
