2022)

Elon Musk works in every role at Twitter except for CEO. Today, we’ll be discussing his stint in HR.

Dumb Man Yells At Cloud

On November 13th, I saw Elon Musk send out a Tweet claiming that Twitter was super slow in many countries because the app was doing >1000 poorly batched RPC just to render a home page.

Tweet in question.

This immediately sounded like something someone would say if they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. I’m sure it was the same for lots of other folks who work in tech. Granted, I know next to nothing about Twitter under the hood, but using “RPC” in this context sounded like when my Dad asked me if he could make a phone call at the same time Alexa was playing music.

We ditched the dial-up modem quite awhile ago, Grandpa. While it’s possible this is in the area of being accurate, when Musk makes the claim, it sounds like someone spewing techno babble that they don’t understand. Like when an undercover cop doesn’t know how to hold a crack pipe correctly.

The idea that Twitter is using batched remote procedure calls instead of REST just doesn’t feel right coming from a CEO. And then to blame the codebase for an intermittent problem without mentioning an accompanying change… No. That’s not how any of this works!

Anyway. I just assumed he fired the infra team responsible for monitoring their load balancers in regions external to the US and then moved on with my life.

EDIT (11/15/2022): Turns out that last night, Musk publicly fired another engineer for confirming that the original problem was, in fact, due to firing their infra team.

He Who Commits More Comments Gets To Stay

Then today, on November 14th, I see a thread of Tweets wherein Elon Musk — the fucking CEO of Twitter — is publicly fighting with one of his engineers. I guess this engineer, Eric Frohnhoefer, missed his opportunity to be unceremoniously shit-canned by the Thanos snap that took out the other half of his colleagues.

The premise itself is unhinged. This guy is the CEO of three companies and he’s in a fight with an engineer in front of 115 million followers. Then at 6 PM on a Sunday, Elon tweets this to him:

Twitter is super slow on Android. What have you done to fix that?

Hey man, real quick… What the fuck?

I’ve never seen anything like it. Granted, I prefer to work for smaller companies because the stress of large companies seems like an untenable exchange of money for sanity, but this the craziest — entry level management shit — that I’ve ever seen. This isn’t a thing that happens. This activated my uncanny valley response.

Bad managers will blame something on a member of the team in a private internal Slack channel. Terrible managers will do it in a public channel. An absolute shithead will do it in an all-hands meeting. All internal.

This idiot is asking a current employee, in front of the world, why his commits haven’t cured his platform’s cancer yet — like that even makes sense in the first place. Does he think this guy is fucking Steve Wozniak soldering boards in a garage by himself? It’s probably a code base that has been touched by hundreds of engineers, and several components are shitting out; assuming that it’s even the code’s fault. (Press X to Doubt, etc…)

You Can’t Spell Chernobyl Without Elon

How can you see this and ever want to work for this guy again? Elon Musk has to be radioactive to engineers now, regardless of what he pays. Because of that, nobody in their right mind should ever trust a Tesla enough to get in one again. They should start questioning the human flights to space, too. Every engineer who’s been exposed to any of this cannot think working for this guy is a stable career decision. It’s been made clear that his engineers going forward are going to be the best boot lickers and their code won’t matter.

The creator of the most repeated functions gains seniority. They who write classes gets thrown out on their asses.

Laugh at his memes and it doesn’t matter whose family of four you incinerate with your faulty door lock code. Opportunities at Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter are now opportunities to get your name dragged through the mud in front of 115 million people. The people who stoop to take these positions are not going to be worthy of anyone’s trust in their work.

Oh, I almost forgot…

Elon Musk fired the engineer at the end of the same thread, also publicly. Not directly of course. That would mean there’s a spine in there somewhere. No, it was a reply to two other idiots. One of whom describes himself a “Top 1% Software Engineer.” in his profile. Holy hell.

I’m sure Eric Frohnhoefer was already on his way out and saw it coming, but I’m also now certain that Elon Musk is a gigantic piece of shit with a historically fragile ego. But at the same time, I’m kind of impressed that he’s shown me something on the Internet I’ve never seen before. I’ve been here since the 90’s.