Twitter employee asks Elon Musk directly if he’s fired
On Monday evening, one of those employees, Haraldur Thorleifsson, a well-known designer at the company, complained on Twitter that the company had yet to confirm his dismissal, nine days after he was locked out of his work computer.
Twitter’s CEO responded by asking Haraldur what he does on Twitter. Musk even tweeted that he would allow Haraldur to breach confidentiality to share what he did.
But after Haraldur shared some of his responsibilities on Twitter, Musk responded with a bracket from the film Office Space, in which two consultants challenge an employee with a question: “What would you say you’re doing here?”
On February 26, it was reported that Haraldur was one of 200 employees the social media company laid off in late February. Haraldur, who joined Twitter in 2021, even posted one Bye tweet on the same day.
However, according to his tweets, it wasn’t until after his Twitter conversation with Musk that Haraldur received official confirmation that he was “no longer employed” at the company.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The social media company no longer has a communications department.
Acquire
Haraldur joined Twitter in 2021 after selling his design agency Ueno to the social media company. The sale has been portrayed as “acqui-hire,” or when a company is bought for its talent and not other parts of its business.
According to Haraldur’s personal website, he led an “innovation team” at Twitter that helped spearhead the Twitter communities and the service’s “edit button.”
Now for that edit button @Jack
— Halli (@iamharaldur) January 6, 2021
offered Haraldur more details of his work in his conversation with Musk Monday, which included “shifting the company away from focusing on power users and toward younger users (because our user base is aging).”
Musk responded by questioning Haraldur’s work, tweet: “Pictures or it didn’t happen.”
Twitter layoffs
Other Twitter acquisitions have fared poorly since Musk bought the company. Twitter fired Martijn de Kuijper, the founder of Revue, a newsletter service Twitter acquired in 2021 as part of its Feb. 26 job cuts.
“Looks like I’ve been fired. Now my revue journey is really over”, de Kujiper tweeted. Twitter shut down Revue last year.
Both Haraldur and de Kujiper were on a “do not fire” list due to the cost of their firing, she reported platformer, a newsletter by technology journalists Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton. (On Monday, Haraldur asked on Twitter whether the company “will pay me what it owes me under my contract”).
Continuous layoffs may be taking their toll on Twitter, which has had frequent disruptions in recent weeks.
On Monday, Twitter suffered another outage as users complained that they couldn’t share images or access links. platformer reported that the outage was due to Twitter shutting down free access to the company’s API.
platformer reports that only one site reliability engineer was assigned to the project, who made a “poor configuration change” that destroyed both the Twitter platform and many of its internal tools, citing a current employee at the company.
“A small API change had a massive impact. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason,” Musk said tweeted On Monday. “Will eventually have to be completely rewritten.”
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