Elon Musk says he fired engineer who corrected him on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk says he fired engineer who corrected him on Twitter

theverge.com

36 pointsmfiguiere29 comments

Here's another correction.

News quote: // Asked what it felt like to be a “media mogul” after buying Twitter he said: “It is a medium as opposed to media." //

Notions of singular/plural and dissembling aside, you do realise you're just the big, exaggerated version of "guy who wastes his life on social media", right??? I mean, come on man. What the heck are you doing? It's the exact same trap that the most middling of ordinary people fall into - just suitably bigger, scaled to your role.

Nobody expected da Vinci to run the local town square. In fact I'm sure we're all glad he didn't.

Excuse me, that's "guy who wastes his life on social medium."

The actual "correction" thread:

https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/15919687831489208...

Twitter sadly seems to be going rapidly downhill. Musk only seems to have sped up its decline.

FührerBunker vibes. I guess Steiner is now in charge of the Android division?

EDIT: For those who have not seen the movie, watch "The Downfall" (2004) for a peek at what might be going on in the Trump/Musk/Putin camp right now. Applies to anyone who has a NPD really

At some point the leader will have to be informed, quietly, that Steiner was not able to raise his assault

Pretty thin skinned for a claimed free speech absolutist.

Musk: Cancel Cancel Culture! 4:35 PM · May 19, 2020

Also Musk: I cancelled my engineer who had the guts to disagree with me.

That was already clear when he started a smear campaign against the Thailand cave rescuer guy who didn't like his submarine idea, calling the guy a pedo.

Publicly calling your CEO out like that will generally get you fired. It would be newsworthy if the engineer didn't get released.

That's true. But it's also a setup to get Musk to make yet another own goal by showing how hollow Musk's free-speech absolutism is.

The speech was free in that it wasn't muzzled, the tweet is still up. Doesn't mean it was free of the usual consequences.

If your comment on something, which in turn was right or not ends having consequences then free speech doesn't apply at all.

I see that "the usual consequences" isn't all that popular based on downvoting. These comments are staying up on HN, it's handling the speech and the speech is gathering consequences too. Speech has consequences. If I insult your choice of clothing in front of a crowd, I can expect you to disinvite me from your party.

Perhaps this is a question of the use of the word "free". There's a narrow interpretation of it to mean "able to be said" and also "allowed or constrained by government". Twitter deplatforming this engineer would be fit the narrow flavor, and nothing written so far suggests that happened. Elon has not said the Twitter will have a free-speech-oriented employer-employee dynamic. Few if any workplaces have. I'd be very interested in hearing from people who think their management chain would handle it well, especially if they think their management chain would publicly pop off with the information level on topics that Elon appears to be.

I'm not on the side of a petty thin-skinned manager behaving like this at all. I just believe it is pretty much the common case that managers called out in public will fire you, so you'd expect it. Especially from Elon.

> Publicly calling your CEO out like that will generally get you fired. It would be newsworthy if the engineer didn't get released.

You can only think that as an unavoidable consequence if you assume the CEO's ego is more important than the company.

Not necessarily more important than the company, but you got my drift perfectly. Many CEOs would get you into Siberia and released over a period of months, quietly. Not this one, and I think everyone knew that ahead of time.

Mhm... I don't know some better ones might see a spin in it and use it for themselves instead of playing "though".

The fact these people don't realize this kind of behavior is unacceptable is ironic considering they've been censoring everyone else's for years.

As long as you know it's unacceptable then it makes standing up an act of bravery. If you think it's dunk-on-the-man time because of groupthink and collective disdain then you'll likely be surprised by the consequences.

If you look at his profile and some of the other replies he did it's clear he wanted to get fired.

Someone from Reddit also offered him a job* and seemed understanding of what he did.

* https://twitter.com/softwarejameson/status/15920206816882442...

Play stupid games win stupid prizes?

People are shocked that they can’t dunk on their boss in public. Lol.

The guy wanted to get fired, obviously. These people who kamikaze like that are getting free followers, a great story, a ton of inbound job interest, and the pleasure of wasting some of Elon's time (his most valuable and limited resource). If you resign quietly, you get nothing. Makes total sense.

Kinda shitty of the boss to be dunking on the employees to begin with.

"Never punch down"

So, are there 1,000 RPCs needed to render the timeline or not?

The Android engineer didn't seem to know the difference between an RPC and a request from an end user client. The former timeline engineer disabled public responses to his tweet and has refused to elaborate. Neither of them backed up their contradiction with a rebuttal.

Edit: Was curious so did some digging and found more:

> @elonmusk:

> I was told ~1200 RPCs independently by several engineers at Twitter, which matches # of microservices. The ex-employee is wrong.

> Same app in US takes ~2 secs to refresh (too long), but ~20 secs in India, due to bad batching/verbose comms. Actually useful data transferred is low.

> Part of today will be turning off the “microservices” bloatware. Less than 20% are actually needed for Twitter to work!

> And we will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space & compute) below every tweet. Literally no one even knows why we did that …

Elon Musk said "the App makes >1000 RPC".

Calling the backend services the "App" would be atypical. So it's expected than an App engineer (the one on Android, the most popular Twitter App) would assume Elon is talking about calls made by the App, wouldn't he?

There may be 1000+ microservices fed the firehose and so on on the backend. Sure.

But... those microservices also existed two weeks ago, when Twitter was running just fine.

Did you even read the Twitter thread? The number (~20) was provided right there.

Yes, and I also know the difference between a request from an end user client and a server-to-server RPC which was referenced in Musk’s tweet. The Android engineer is confusing the two, and so are you apparently.

Space Karen didn’t make that distinction in his original tweet: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591853644944932865

In fact by referring to the “App” making “RPCs” (2nd sentence), the most straight forward interpretation is that he was talking about client -> server calls.

That depends on proximate versus ultimate causes. Does the Android app "need" the 20 initial HTTP requests or does it "need" the thousands of services that ultimately keep that data in good shape?

I think most people, talking specifically about a client program, mean the former, as the latter is out of its control

Reply on news.ycombinator.com