Offended by a remark from Elon Musk on the slowness of the Twitter application, which he helped develop, engineer Eric Frohnhoefer tried to explain to him that he was wrong. At the end of the trade, Elon Musk announced his dismissal publicly.
Is contradicting your boss publicly a good idea? With hindsight, Eric Frohnhoefer, the author of the facts, describes his idea as “definitely stupid”. If it seems quite obvious that the engineer did not carry Elon Musk in his heart, his moment of glory on social networks will have cost him his place at Twitter, where he arrived in August 2014. His wrongs are as follows: having contradicts Elon Musk publicly and failing to satisfy the new boss of the social network when he asked her for an explanation. At the request of his fans, who did not like his detractor’s remarks, Elon Musk fired Eric Frohnhoefer.
Is the Twitter application too slow?
It all starts with a tweet posted on November 13 by Elon Musk. Very active on Twitter, where he posts dozens of messages a day, the businessman wished “apologize for the slowness of Twitter in many countries”. He then gave the reason for these delays, supposedly caused by the fact that the application makes more than 1,000 RPC (remote procedure call) requests to refresh the news feed. Since Elon Musk wants to change everything at Twitter, this tweet hinted that he intended to simplify the process.
3 hours after Elon Musk’s tweet, Eric Frohnhoefer stepped into the limelight. The engineer, a priori upset by the message from his boss, contradicted his words: “I’ve been working on Twitter for Android for about 6 years and I can say this is wrong. »
Since everything is viral in the Musksphere, Eric Frohnhoefer’s tweet was taken up by both the billionaire’s detractors (who were quick to share it to make fun of it) and by Elon Musk fans, who s are taken to his arrogance towards their idol.
Elon Musk also reacted, asking his employee for justifications: “Then correct me. What is the correct number? ». Two minutes later, Elon Musk asked one of his favorite questions: “Twitter is super slow on Android. What did you do to fix this? “. Since his arrival, Elon Musk likes to ask everyone what they have done well to deserve their place, often with the assumption that most of his interlocutors would have done nothing with their days (he had in particular makes this reproach to Parag Agrawal, the former boss of Twitter).
In the process, Eric Frohnhoefer published a thread to explain his role at Twitter and the operation of the application, in which he was rather collaborative.
The engineer explained to Elon Musk that the application was sometimes slow because of an aging code, which deserves to be refined. According to him, the number of requests made in the background is around 20, and not 1,000 as Elon Musk claims. His advice to his boss would be to remove old features to make the app work better.
After this thread, Elon Musk and the engineer had a final public exchange…about the quality of Twitter’s canteen. Eric Frohnhoefer responded to a tweet from his boss claiming Twitter was spending too much money on food by saying it was really good. Tease, Elon Musk told him that he agreed and that “the food was excellent” but, on the other hand, the fact “that it doesn’t realize there are 1,200 services called in the Twitter app isn’t great”. Eric Frohnhoefer tried to justify his calculation, without answer.
In response to some of his subscribers, Elon Musk has explained that the number of requests was 1,200 according to the people he spoke with, and that Eric Frohnhoefer was wrong. According to the billionaire, the Twitter application opens in 2 seconds in the United States and in 20 seconds in India due to poor optimization work (the engineer, on the other hand, claims that it is not linked to Twitter).
Fired publicly, by tweet
Some fans of Elon Musk, who spend their time singing the billionaire’s praises, then asked him to fire Eric Frohnhoefer who would not have “a good attitude”. Elon Musk responded with a simple “He is fired”without having alerted his employee beforehand of his decision.
Active on Twitter, Eric Frohnhoefer explained that his actions were “definitely stupid”. Several of Musk’s fans respond to all of his tweets in defense of the billionaire. The engineer also explained that he was involved in a project released last week, so that users could mix content in a tweet (a photo and a video at the same time, for example).
Later, while trying to log into his work computer, Eric Frohnhoefer confirmed that Elon Musk’s tweet was not a bluff. He was fired by Elon Musk. The moral of this story is that it is better to avoid publicly criticizing your boss on social networks, especially when the latter is the owner…