Elon's paranoid purge
Q&A with Twitter engineer Eric Frohnhoefer, fired for correcting Elon Musk
The emails went out in the middle of the night.
“Hi,” they began. “We regret to inform you that your employment is terminated effective immediately. Your recent behavior has violated company policy.”
That behavior? Criticizing Musk, either publicly on Twitter or privately in Slack. Some of the roughly two dozen employees who were fired had simply expressed sympathy for three workers who Musk had fired for criticizing him the day before.
The new purge, which followed layoffs of 50 percent of Twitter’s full-time workforce and an 80 percent reduction in its number of contractors, reflects a growing paranoia in Musk’s inner circle, according to eight current and former employees. Musk has become obsessed with the idea that his employees might sabotage the site, they said, leading to near-total freeze on writing and shipping code and firings of anyone suspected of being disloyal.
In truth, several employees told me, the reality is the opposite: many workers are hanging on largely because they still believe in Twitter’s promise and feel a responsibility to keep the site up and running during a period of intense turmoil.
In any case, the resulting firings wiped out some of Twitter’s most senior engineering leadership. They also left employees scrambling to remove Slack posts and even emoji reactions that could be perceived as critical of the Musk regime, sources said.
Among those fired Tuesday was Yao Yue, a principal software engineer and 12-year employee of the company, who had tweeted “don’t resign, let him fire you” five days ago. “One of the absolute best engineers we had,” a current employee told me. “She is a legend in her area of expertise.”
The firings were jarring in part because they represented such a sharp departure from the Twitter of old. Under Jack Dorsey’s leadership, Twitter tolerated criticism to a fault — at times paralyzing the company. But under the mantra “communicate fearlessly to build trust,” employees posted candid feedback and even criticism of their bosses under the expectation that it would be received as constructive.
Moreover, the company is still at least nominally operating under the code of conduct that it had before Musk took over. That policy does not prohibit employees from criticizing company leadership, sources said. And so some of those fired on Tuesday said they had been fired for violating a “mystery policy” that no one had been aware of until today.
But that didn’t seem to bother Elon Musk, who ramped up his signature trolling today with snide jokes about the fired engineers. “I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses,” he snarled. “Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.” Later, he replied to a post from the notorious Libs of TikTok account that mocked another fired engineer who had criticized him on Twitter. “A tragic case of adult onset Tourette’s,” Musk tweeted.
That brings us to Eric Frohnhoefer. An 8-year employee of Twitter, on Sunday Frohnhoefer waded into a conversation Musk had started about the service’s technical architecture.
Musk had tweeted an apology “for Twitter being super slow in certain countries.” He blamed this slowness on “poorly batched RPCs” — remote process calls — which, as we discussed here Monday, reflects a profound ignorance about how Twitter works. Musk also said he planned to unplug 80 percent of the microservices that power various parts of Twitter, saying they were unnecessary.
Frohnhoefer quote-tweeted Musk on Sunday afternoon:
Frohnhoefer followed up with a calm, polite, detailed thread about the actual reasons that Twitter can be slow. On Monday Musk tweeted that he had fired Frohnhoefer.
Musk later deleted the tweet.
On Tuesday I interviewed Frohnhoefer in a Google Doc. We talked about his job, how Musk changed Twitter’s culture, and whether comedy was in fact legal again on Twitter.
Casey Newton: So what did you do at Twitter, before all this happened?
Eric Frohnhoefer: I was a staff software engineer. I was the Android tech lead responsible for tweet rendering, tweet composer, tweet details, and a few other random pieces of the app. My personal focus was on performance and developer productivity. As I pointed out in my tweets, performance really drives key company metrics.
How would you describe the culture before Elon got there? What was it like to work there?
It was a great place to work. Peers were caring and supportive of each other. I think this shows in how Tweeps continue to help each other find jobs and work on resumes. It was also very thoughtful about how we approach product development. From the outside it might look like things took forever. But due diligence, iteration, and experimentation take time.
Did you have strong feelings about Musk one way or the other before he bought the company?
No. I was mostly wait and see. Admittedly, I was worried based on how Musk runs his other companies. I really liked my team and the work we were doing. The team had recently finished the mixed media project and seeing all the new memes was awesome.
(The tweet Eric added here looks way better in the app and on the web than it does in the Substack preview if you want to click through — Casey.)
Let’s talk about Musk’s spree of tweets about Twitter’s technical architecture. What was he wrong about, exactly?
Everything. There were a number of concepts that were mixed up. Apps (iOS/Web/Android) don’t make RPC calls. Typically apps use a REST or GraphQl API. As I pointed out in my tweet, the Android app makes less than 20 network calls to show the home timeline.
The backend services typically use RPC to communicate. However, this is done within the data center over very fast network links. As some of my peers have pointed out, the >1000 RPC calls are unlikely to be the cause of performance issues.
I also shared that the number of services to create the home timeline response was less than 200. (Number of services does not necessarily equal the number of RPC calls.) I don’t know the actual number of RPC calls, but I do know the actual number of services required to render the home timeline response.
I know there are (were?) lots of people inside who are experts on Twitter’s technical infrastructure, and have likely explained it to him. Do you have any idea where he’s getting his ideas about how Twitter works?
There is very little trust between management and employees. I assume he gets all his information from the Tesla goons. But I don't have much direct knowledge here.
Alright, so you decided to tweet. Twitter is known for having a culture that encourages internal dissent. And Musk himself regularly talks about his commitment to free speech. Did you have that in mind when you tweeted?
Free speech doesn't mean there aren’t consequences. In the past workers were very vocal about leadership internally and externally. One recent example was the [Fast Company] article where [former chief design officer] Dantley Davis said there was a “rest and vest culture”.
Was that kind of vocal criticism good for the company?
At times it seemed counterproductive. Especially when it continued after [former CEO] Jack Dorsey said he supported Dantley. Overall it was a positive.
Did you think you were at risk of being fired for what you said?
I didn’t think I was crossing the line. I think my followup tweets explaining the issues were very professional. Unfortunately, Musk was more interested in my snarky replies to his followers.
🤷 I thought comedy was legal again.
So there was this big purge of Twitter employees overnight, some of whom had allegedly posted in support of you after you were fired. What do you make of all this?
The internet can be filled with a lot of hate. I have been really surprised by the kind support of people inside and outside of Twitter. It used to be such a great place to work. Summary firings (especially over tweets) were never part of the Twitter culture.
Musk seems intensely paranoid that his engineers are going to sabotage the site. And yet most of the people I speak with there are staying on primarily because they love the site and are trying to keep it running. Did you sense that disconnect as well?
I don't have any real insight into management's thinking, but I think fear of sabotage is one of the reasons behind lockdown. I think active sabotage is a significant career-limiting move and unlikely.
We all love Twitter as a service and want to see it succeed. For me the toxic leadership makes working there extremely difficult.
A huge amount of engineering leadership and talent has now left the company, and the World Cup is about to begin. Do you think Twitter is at risk for a prolonged outage?
It's possible. I don't think Twitter will just crash and burn. You'll likely see the time to fix things increase as people who are left have to come up to speed with unfamiliar services.
There are still a ton of talented people left. Many are unable to speak out due to financial or visa issues.
— Zoe Schiffer contributed to this report.
Elsewhere: Twitter Blue will relaunch November 29, Musk says. The company also acknowledged that two-factor authentication had temporarily broken on Monday for some users.
Governing
Meta and WhatsApp each lost a top executive in India as people stepped down in the wake of the layoffs. The head of WhatsApp in India and public policy director for India are out. (Vikas SN / Moneycontrol)
Apple launched Emergency SOS via Satellite for iPhone 14 users in the US and Canada. (Apple)
Industry
Sam Bankman-Fried did his first interview since FTX filed for bankruptcy. He dodged questions about what led to the collapse and said he is sleeping fine at night. (David Yaffe-Bellany / New York Times)
Bankman-Fried has been calling investors to try and raise money to repay some of the roughly $8 billion FTX owes customers. (Caitlin Ostroff, Vicky Ge Huang and Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal)
FTX may have more than 1 million creditors, according to documents it filed as part of its bankruptcy proceedings. (Nikhilesh De / CoinDesk)
FTX co-founder Gary Wang has stayed out of the spotlight, but he played a key role at the exchange and its sister firm Alameda Research. (Kari McMahon / The Block)
Binance said it will submit evidence to UK lawmakers regarding discussions held about FTX when the two were in talks about an acquisition as well as on Binance’s decision to sell more than $500 million in FTT in early November. (Emily Nicolle / Bloomberg)
Twitter users are posting last-minute announcements and appeals as the platform falls further into chaos. (Emma Bubola / New York Times)
YouTube is rolling out shopping features on its short-form video product Shorts so users can buy products as they scroll through videos. (Cristina Criddle and Hannah Murphy / Financial Times)
Amazon opened a virtual health clinic where users can search for, connect with, and pay for telehealth care. (Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch)
Those good tweets
Talk to us
Send us tips, comments, questions, and what you would tweet at Elon Musk to get fired: casey@platformer.news and zoe@platformer.news.
Thanks to Eric for speaking out in the first place and for the thoughtful, level-headed responses he's sharing here in the aftermath. I work in tech recruiting and it's quite disheartening to see employees who have been so overtly wronged by an employer (and in this case — multiply wrongdoing by 1000x, add PERSONAL TROLLING from a CEO who's averaging ~3 catastrophic decisions per day) express fear that public criticism makes you unhireable down the road. Not saying that Eric is implying this, but I've heard a lot of this fear in the discourse around recent tech layoffs. That old industry mindset is toxic and grew out of the days when companies could get away with silencing employees under the guise of "protecting our ability to surprise and delight users." Today's talent market is so competitive that companies and their recruiters would almost never ding someone for speaking up in this way...unless, I guess, the CEO is another flavor of Musk. But there are many companies out there that don't have this problem and desperately need great tech managers. If anything, voicing dissent on public channels shows courage, leadership, and a kind of savviness (either technical expertise, or in other areas like your personal rights, product/legal considerations, effective communication, etc.) that stands out in a field like engineering. At this point, especially at Twitter, I think this is sadly just about the last recourse employees have to escape a shitshow with dignity intact.
Great interview. Although I’m not sure how great it is to give a platform to someone who openly criticized his boss on Twitter. There are other avenues for correction. Reading his replies it was clear he did not have comedic intent.
That all being said, this Twitter content has been great.