A fired Twitter engineer said he would have made “a lot smarter and more devastating jokes” about Elon Musk had he known he was being canned

• A Twitter engineer said he believes he was fired for criticizing Elon Musk on Slack.

• He said he would have come up with “much smarter and more devastating jokes” if he had known he was going to be fired.

• Musk was quick to get rid of workers who didn’t agree with him.

A fired Twitter engineer said he would have made “a lot smarter and more devastating jokes” about new owner Elon Musk had he known he was being fired.

After laying off about half of the company’s workforce, Musk has fired workers for criticizing him and his leadership from Twitter, either on the platform or in Slack messages, leading some workers to reportedly quit their jobs in fear of losing them removed their jobs.

A current employee previously told Insider that the layoffs appear to have targeted many people in an internal Slack channel called Social Watercooler, which has around 2,000 members and has long been used by employees to chat and criticize the company.

Daniel Fletcher, who appears to have been a software engineer at Twitter, tweeted on November 15: “I was fired for unspecified recent behavior that violates unspecified company policy, e.g. B. for hanging out in the #social water cooler.”

He had also retweeted a number of posts criticizing Musk’s leadership, including one from the now-fired Twitter engineer Benjamin Leib, who said Musk had “no idea what he’s talking about.”

On Friday, Fletcher posted a thread commemorating his time with the social media giant. As well as talking about his job and praising his colleagues, he also commented on the jokes he believed led to his layoffs.

“If I had known I was going to be fired for participating in the 1200RPC discussion or for making fun of Elon in Slack (who knows? We were never told that!) I would have been far smarter and more devastating Jokes came up,” Fletcher tweeted.

“I mean come on Elon we were just joking around.”

“The 1200RPC discussion” refers to a tweet by Musk apologizing for the app’s “super slow” performance. Leib and two other engineers said they were fired after publicly criticizing the tweet.

The story goes on

“I had the honor of working on the US #ElectionSquad 2022 (which was decimated in the Thanos snapshot) and was building a generic malicious media detection system when the ax found me late Monday night,” Fletcher said.

Twitter staffers have jokingly dubbed Musk’s firings the “Thanos Snap,” referring to the Marvel character who destroyed half the universe by snapping his fingers.

“I actually wanted 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 the mass layoffs and targeted layoffs, dozens of Twitter employees have also opted 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 had to be “extremely persistent” 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 roughly 4,000 employees have opted to remain with the company.

“I bet that millennia of expertise and expertise have decided to leave Twitter today. Let THAT sink in for you,” Fletcher tweetedwhich refers to how Musk dumped a sink at Twitter HQ the day before his deal to buy the platform.

Read the original article on Business Insider