Why Elon Musk ‘Fired’ This App Developer on Twitter

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Twitter CEO Elon Musk, who has been laying off employees and contractors of the microblogging platform, has fired yet another member of his Twitter team. The person whose employment was terminated by Musk is an Android developer named Eric Frohnhoefer who had stated in his tweet that Musk’s assessment of Twitter being slow as the app is doing “> 1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render timelines,” was wrong. A remote procedure call (RPC) allows a program on one computer to a service from a program located on another device and is used in distributed computing.

On Sunday night, Musk tweeted, “Btw, I’d like to apologize for Twitter being super slow in many countries. App is doing > 1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!”

Later, the developer quoted Musk’s tweet and wrote, “I’ve spent ~6 years working on Twitter for Android and I can say that this is wrong.” Musk asked him, “Then please correct me. What is the right number?” He also asked, “Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?”

As reactions to Frohnhoefer’s Twitter conversation poured in, a pseudonymous user stated, “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.”

“Maybe he should ask questions privately. Maybe using Slack or email,” the developer replied curtly. Another user then chimed in and tagged Musk in his tweet, asking the billionaire, “with this kind of attitude, you probably don’t want this guy on your team.”

Musk responded stating, “He’s fired.”

Since acquiring Twitter Musk has fired several employees of the company including CEO Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and even the Board of Directors.

He has also made a flurry of decisions impacting the working of Twitter which has millions of daily active users.

Among the biggest change that Twitter is seeing is the inclusion of the new $7.99 per month Blue subscription. However, Musk’s decision to implement the blue tick fee did not go well with many, and several major brands have pulled, or paused their advertisements from the microblogging website.


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