A Twitter engineerfired after the arrival of Elon Musksays the his experience in the company in the last year. From the first rumors of the billionaire’s arrival, until he had to leave a meeting on Google Meet midway because the security team had blocked his access to office email. After a weekend of helping a colleague launch Twitter Blue’s paid blue ticks.
Twitter: the story of a fired engineer
Manu Cornet is a software engineer who worked for Google for fourteen years and was writing code for Twitter before Elon Musk fired him. Now, although he explains that for his qualifications the There is no shortage of job offers on LinkedIn, decided to participate in the complaint of Twitter employees against the company for the layoffs and to tell his own experience. Both in a Economist article that in one series of vignette which he made.
In his story, Cornet starts by telling the end. Because she came in the most unexpected way possible. The engineer says that after Elon Musk’s arrival on Twitter, he and other colleagues had thrown themselves headlong into programming. Tells about not wondering if Musk’s decisions were smart or not, he didn’t have time: all the news had to arrive immediately and the programmers had to bang on the keyboards at a frenzied pace.
Programming marathon for Twitter Blue
A colleague of his was tasked with developing the payment system for the new one Twitter Blue, which would allow anyone to buy a verified account blue check by paying $8. The same schedule that Musk has now repeatedly put off, after Super Mario flicked the middle finger off a fake Nintendo account for hours and that many advertisers have left the platform for fear of tarnishing your company name.
Cornet explains that his colleague had not had time to think about the possible implications of Musk’s decision, because by the weekend he had to make the blue ticks of paid verified account. A complex system, with many variables given the large number of Twitter users (and the consequent high probability that something would go wrong). So had helped co-worker plan all weekend while sleeping on couch at office. He says he did it willingly, he had experienced this urgency as a challenge. Even though the decision to launch the service was hasty and counterproductive, in one weekend they had managed to overcome an almost impossible programming challenge: the service at a technical level worked well.
The dismissal during an online meeting
After planning all weekend to launch the Twitter Blue service, he had resumed coding for a second project. Musk wanted it end-to-end encryption on direct messages, also in this case he wanted it immediately. Cornet was therefore in a meeting with other programmers on Tuesday. But after about fifteen minutes, Google Meet knocked him out of the conversation.
Cornet immediately saw that someoneor had changed the password of his work email. He thought it was about hackerespecially after the security team sent him a message on his private smartphone saying they needed to speak to him immediately.
But with her company laptop down, before she could contact Twitter’s cybersecurity, she received a phone call from her boss’s boss. He told him he had been fired, one of the first engineers left behind by Twitter. Within the end of the weekmore than half of the social workforce would have to leave the company. Including her boss, her boss’s boss, and two other levels of responsibility above her.
Musk’s Twitter experienced by an engineer
Cronet continues his story to the Economist saying that since the beginning of the year the Twitter environment had changed. After Musk’s first announcement of interest in acquiring the company, management gave assurances that they would not sell. But soon news stopped coming transparently from above and relied on newspapers to know what was going on.
Cornet talks about his first meeting with Elon Musk in June (before he backed out of the acquisition due to bots, then reconsidered in late October). He remembers that the billionaire was not prepared to answer their questions, but also that he didn’t seem at all perturbed by it. Then he recalls Musk’s arrival at the end of October with a sink in the Twitter offices (“let it sink in”), he remembers appreciating the fact that he was willing to joke about these things.
But explain that soon excitement at the arrival of news gave way to anxiety to be jobless. He explains that as a software engineer there is no shortage of offers, but several other colleagues do not have such coveted professions. “Musk made people nervous” he explains, even though “in the beginning I think a lot of people on Twitter liked him“.
He explains that he posted a tool he had developed to download from email company of useful messages for those who feared losing their jobs, such as letters of recommendation or reviews for incentives. An hour and four minutes later he was fired.