Musk fires Twitter Engineer for stating that Musk is wrong | Hacker News Reader

Musk fires Twitter Engineer for stating that Musk is wrong

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I saw this exchange a few hours ago. Pretty wild he got fired for correcting someone else's mistakes. It might seem trivial to confuse RPC with API calls to microservices (not sure why those were in scare quotes...?), but I mean they are meaningfully different. REST is not RPC. But whatever, what a wild time. And to the other person saying he "dunked" on Elon - not really, right? Apparently you can't challenge Elon at all. This is more like despotism than being a benevolent dictator for life.

Musk basically said:

"Sorry Twitter for Android is slow. Our Android engineers are idiots."

Who on Earth would want to be part of such an organization?

Eventually he will be right, only idiots will want to be a part of it. That suits him, he needs to be the smartest person in the room, and absolutely no one can tell him what to do or not to do. He bought Twitter because the board told him what to do. He also moved Tesla's headquarters to Texas for the same reason. It's a pattern with him.

if you are going to publicly go after your boss, at least make sure you are right- https://twitter.com/EricFrohnhoefer/status/15921947898012221...

Twitter guy admits rendering the timeline hits well over 200 different microservices, which probably does add up to around 1000 internal requests. He even admits they have 10 years of tech debt and that they need to fix and essentially blames previous leadership for not focusing on performance. Also every request apparently has to do a full round trip to the US data center regardless of location worldwide. Musk really isn't wrong here, Twitter is a mess

I'm sure they must have a pretty good caching infrastructure, so the number of requests in total is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. They just broke 2FA via SMS literally because he started shutting down components in their SOA.

I’m willing to believe the engineer of 6 years who works on the timeline is more knowledgeable than Musk here

Free speech absolutism has limits. It doesn't mean freely speaking your mind or making technical arguments or worse cracking unlabeled jokes.

if you play with the lion, you may get bitten. even if you're a lion-trainer. engage with musk on twitter at your own risk.

If my coworker tries to dunk on my boss in public, they’re probably going to get terminated.

Not sure what the news is here.

Musk has said he's a free speech absolutist, and also he likes to cultivate an environment where iron sharpens iron.

This shouldn't be job-ending for someone who extends the first amendment to 'corporation owners shall make no rule abridging the freedom of speech, especially in their own town square'..

Exactly!

Everyone loves the speaking part of being a "free speech absolutist", but having to learn to handle the speech of others who enjoy similar absolutism is a far different thing!

Frankly, Elon does not appear to be very well equipped in this area.

And he has options! Lots of them that could be spun in a good direction for everyone.

The thing about free speech absolutism is it goes both ways. All ways, frankly.

Does publicly correcting your boss count as "dunking on" them? I didn't see the employee calling Elon a moron or anything like that.

Elon made a statement, Eric told Elon was wrong based on his experience, Elon asked for him to elaborate, Eric did so, and Elon didn't like that.

If I'm working for you, and you don't have the humility to be wrong about a relatively small detail in public, I don't think I want to work for you anymore.

>Does publicly correcting your boss count as "dunking on" them?

Only if you have a fragile ego that depends on being perceived as brilliant when that is clearly not the case

It's a bit weak of Musk to be so unsure of himself, isn't it?

Does your boss publicly insult your work?

I'm not saying you're wrong, or that what the engineer did wasn't obviously going to lead to getting fired, but I can sympathize with where the motivation to respond came from. I'd certainly not be happy if some corporate raider fired my colleagues and then turned to publicly insulting my and their work.

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