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Ask HN: Thoughts on Twitter Criticisms and Firings?

2 points by rendall ↗ HN
News over the past day is that Elon Musk immediately fired engineers who criticized him on Slack or Twitter. Here's a tweet about it: https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1592539948745650176

For background, some examples:

* https://twitter.com/thinkingfish

* https://twitter.com/thenetmonkey

* https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer (this firing was quite public, and seems to have resulted from this exchange: https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/1591902285403418624 Much of the interaction, including the firing tweet from Musk, has been deleted)

Being Twitter, there are some mean-spirited reactions, but putting those aside, the two camps seem to be: a) on the one hand the firings were justified because being rude to the CEO of your company is unprofessional and disruptive behavior, but b) on the other hand, Twitter had a culture of fearless criticism, and the criticism largely was principled disagreement on engineering or management issues.

I am decidedly in the latter camp, that a team must be able to safely raise issues with management and that these firings are a serious error on Musk's part that might even signal a character problem.

But what do you think? Are the firings even partly justified? If not, is Twitter doomed?

9 comments

[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] thread
ggeorgovassilis
> But what do you think?

As a european I find it baffling how easy layoffs seem to be in the USA. Do highly skilled IT professionals over there actually sign work contracts that allows the employer to fire them on a whim?

lambic2
As someone who's worked in the USA for the last 17 years, even here the way this is done is highly unusual. Musk is acting like a narcissistic, moody dictator who doesn't really give af about anyone unless they are willing to sacrifice everything for him.
lambic2
There is so much irony in this. Musk buys Twitter to "save Free Speech", then promptly fires anyone at Twitter who disagrees with him.
mamonster
One of the things that I find weird about this whole situation is that (from my point of view) the vast majority of the Twitter employees seem to be of the opinion that "We had a pretty good thing going on here for the last 5-6 years, Musk came in and is going to ruin everything".

I think that Twitter employees need to realise that from the point of view of Musk (and public markets up to this year) Twitter is/was/ (will be)? an absolute disaster. Their culture of fearless criticism doesn't seem to have made them a great stock to own, that's for sure.

rideontime
I guess the people who work there care more about their internal culture than their stock price.
blisterpeanuts
I have read that Twitter lost $270 million in 2021, and these folks were getting free lunches, working from home, and apparently enjoying a complete detachment from the realities of business. Now Mr. Musk and his team are trying to run Twitter more like a business; whether that's even possible given the product, I have no idea. Anyway he reportedly wants to turn it into a broader service provider similar to WeChat, with micropayments, streaming content, messaging and voice-video calling. Should be interesting to see how it goes, and also how many of the current employees will still be there in a year or two.
blisterpeanuts
Just on the Frohnhoefer situation, I'm trying to understand the hostility toward Musk expressed in postings here (https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/15919022854034186...) and here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33603418#33603908).

In the Twitter exchange, Musk apologizes for poor performance of the app in some countries, without naming any names, then when an engineer publicly challenges him, he publicly responds, ultimately resulting in the employee's public termination.

Maybe Musk should have taken the discussion offline (in other words not continue it publicly), but anyway the engineer, in my opinion, probably shouldn't have gone public unless he was just looking to virally add to his follower count by dissing a controversial new owner in public.

Also, Frohnhoefer actually had a line in his Twitter status "still at @twitter, open to new opportunities" or something like that. I guess that was his point.