Earlier this month, when Twitter CEO Elon Musk locked his Twitter account to personally test whether locked tweets generated more views than public tweets, many said: I wondered why he didn’t ask a Twitter engineer how the platform would work. I impulsively fired an engineer who tried to provide a different explanation for why views of .
The meeting took place on Tuesday, according to the technology newsletter Platformer. Gathering engineers and advisors, Musk asked his team why his account, which has “more than 100 million followers,” was only getting “tens of thousands of impressions.”
“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, according to multiple sources.
The lead engineer explained that this may be due to waning public interest in masks. To back up the engineer, a Twitter employee provided internal data corresponding to her Google Trends chart, the platform reports.
They also shared the findings of Twitter’s algorithm, which found it to be “unbiased” against CEOs. Mr. Musk has suggested that people have become less interested in following Mr. Musk’s movements online since he made a move to buy him Twitter last April, removing an employee. was to do
“You’ve been fired,” Musk told the engineer, though Platformer didn’t name him because the engineer could be harassed online.
Twitter did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.
Twitter Engineer Continuing Confusion
It’s difficult to determine how many engineers are still employed on Twitter since Musk took over, but CNBC confirmed last month that internal records show that the platform employs only 550 full-time engineers. reported to show Musk disputed CNBC’s report However, it did not directly dispute the reported number of full-time engineers.
One former engineer told CNBC that the company’s code base is so vast that “maintaining different parts of Twitter requires knowledge of different platforms and programming languages.” That means skill sets aren’t always transferable between teams, said the former engineer, and Musk trained engineers so quickly that they had “so much institutional knowledge” that they were suddenly fired. He noted that he would struggle to hand over the responsibilities of all the engineers who were left behind. It would certainly make it harder, the engineer predicted.
