Elon Musk made headlines recently when he publicly fought with software engineer Eric Frohnhoefer over why the company's Android app is slow.
A Twitter employee who publicly doubted Elon Musk on Sunday night has apparently been fired through a tweet.
In one tweet(Opens in a new window), Elon Musk fired (Opens in a new window) Eric Frohnhoefer, a software engineer for Twitter's Android app.
Elon Musk blamed the timing of slow performance on “poorly batched” remote procedure calls. Static linking, a commonly used technique in computer programming, has been shown to perform worse with some operating systems than others at times.
The Huffington Post reports Elon Musk's latest claim is that the official "app" has done more than 1000 poorly-batched remote procedure calls to render an individual's home timeline.
One developer on the Twitter for Android team, Frohnhoefer disagreed with Marcus' claims and said that "This is wrong" in a public tweet. The tweet now has over 60,000 likes.
Musk replied, "Then please correct me. What is the right number?" while asking, "Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?"
When Frohnhoefer investigated the issue, he found that there was nothing to do with a high number of remote procedure calls in the app. Instead, he found the problem stemmed from inefficient software coding.
He explained that "First [Twitter has] accumulated years of tech debt as we have traded velocity and features over perf." He also mentioned that "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." As a result, the engineer advocated for Twitter to "aggressively" delete unnecessary features and rewrite software code in order to combat the 10+ years of technical debt.
"I love my iPhone. Android is nice but has a greater variety of devices that provide different performance outcomes. This can make Android great, but also frustrating."
"It looks like Elon has never tried using this app," Frohnhoefer replies. "Otherwise he would not be publishing these complaints on Twitter without first finding a solution."
In a tweet responding to Frohnhoefer, Musk implied that Frohnhoefer was not skilled at software engineering. "The fact that you don't realize that there are up to 1200 'microservices' being called when someone uses the Twitter app is not great," Musk wrote (Opens in a new window).
A Twitter user from Musk's team then tweeted, "With this kind of attitude, you probably don't want this guy on your team." Musk apparently agreed and wrote in a tweet, "He's fired."
In response to Trump's remarks, Frohnhoefer just posted a "salute emoji." Yesterday he also tweeted, "My LinkedIn account has never been more popular". This is an indicator that he won't have a hard time finding a new job.
It's no secret that Musk has been having a hard time retaining Twitter staff. In just one week, several executives resigned. And last month, he initiated mass layoffs. But it's also pretty clear he believes the company could face bankruptcy unless they find new ways to generate revenue.
The person at Frohnhoefer did not respond to a request for comment. In the meantime, Elon Musk tweeted: "Part of today will be turning off the 'microservices' bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!"
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