by - A Twitter engineer said he believes he was fired for criticizing Elon Musk on Slack.
- He said he would have come up with “much wittier, more devastating jokes” had he known he would be fired.
- Musk has been quick to get rid of workers who disagree with him.
A fired Twitter engineer said he would have come up with “much wittier and more devastating jokes” about new owner Elon Musk had he known he would be fired.
After laying off around half of the company’s workforce, Musk has been firing workers for criticizing him and his leadership on Twitter, either on the platform or in Slack messages, leading to some workers delete their posts for fear of losing their jobs.
A current employee previously told Insider that the layoffs appeared to be targeting many people on an internal Slack channel called Social Watercooler, which has around 2,000 members and has long been used by staff to chat and criticize the company. .
Daniel Fletcher, who appeared to be a software engineer on Twitter, tweeted on November 15: “I was fired for unspecified recent behavior in violation of unnamed company policy, ie hanging out in the #social-watercooler.”
He had also retweeted some posts criticizing Musk’s leadership, including one from since-fired Twitter engineer Benjamin Leib, who said Musk “has no idea what he’s talking about.”
On Friday, Fletcher posted a thread commemorating his time at the social media giant. In addition to talking about his work and praising his colleagues, he commented on the pranks that he believed led to his firing.
“If I knew I’d get fired for participating in the 1200 RPC discussion or mocking Elon on slack (who knows? they never told us!) then I would have come up with much more witty and devastating jokes,” Fletcher tweeted.
“I mean, come on, Elon, we were just playing.”
“The 1200 RPC discussion” refers to a tweet from Musk where he apologized for the app’s “super slow” performance. Leib and two other engineers said they were fired after publicly criticizing the tweet.
“I had the honor of working on the 2022 USA #ElectionSquad (which was decimated in the Thanos snap) and was in the middle of building a generic system for the detection of harmful media when the hatchet found me.” Monday night,” Fletcher said.
Twitter staffers have been jokingly referring to Musk’s firings as “the Thanos snap,” referencing the Marvel character who destroyed half the universe by snapping his fingers.
“I intended to spend my entire career on Twitter,” Fletcher added.
After Musk took control of Twitter, both current and fired employees were quick to post tweets mocking or criticizing the tech mogul, spawning dozens of memes.
In addition to mass layoffs and selective layoffs, dozens of Twitter workers have also chosen to leave the company. Many of these came in the form of voluntary layoffs after Musk outlined his vision for “Twitter 2.0” and told workers they would have to be “extremely tough” and work “long hours at high intensity.”
A person familiar with the company’s processes told Insider’s Kali Hays that less than half of the company’s remaining 4,000 or so employees chose to stay with the company.
“I bet millennia of domain knowledge and experience chose to leave Twitter today. Let THAT sink in,” Fletcher tweetedreferring to how Musk brought a sinkhole to Twitter headquarters the day before his deal to buy the platform went through.
