Ask HN: Thoughts on Twitter Criticisms and Firings?

2 points

4 years ago

News over the past day is that Elon Musk immediately fired engineers who criticized him on Slack or Twitter. Here's a tweet about it: https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1592539948745650176

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?

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