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?
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.
"Thread: Twitter Engineers Fired for Correcting Musk" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33611136
"He’s Fired" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33603172
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.
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?