Elon Musk Attracts Criticism Over Firing Employee Because of Disability

Twitter CEO Elon Musk is in the hot seat yet again. The richest man in the world has taken to his personal Twitter account to discuss the reasoning for a former Twitter employee’s firing. Many feel that the entire issue should have been handled privately through the company’s human resources department, but others feel that the public needed to see this conversation.

The primary cause of concern was Musk’s public mention of the employee’s disability. As an employer, it was not legally his place to disclose that information publicly. Many Twitter users felt that Musk’s stated reasons for firing the former engineer were rooted in ableism, as Musk insinuated that he lied about being disabled.

Musk’s tweets all stemmed from the employee, Haraldur Thorleifsson, alleging that he was abruptly fired without reason. His access to company resources was terminated with no notice, and after allegedly not receiving an answer privately from HR via email, Thorleiffson took the situation public.

Thorleifsson has muscular dystrophy, and designed and developed Ueno, an agency acquired by Twitter in 2021 prior to Musk’s purchase of the company. According to his official website, Thorleiffson has been awarded several honors

in the U.S. and in his native Iceland, for both his accomplishments as a web designer and developer and his efforts to promote accessibility for people with disabilities globally.

He went on to clarify that Elon Musk also never answered private messages regarding his termination. Thorleiffson took the moment to educate Twitter users about his disability. He additionally explained that he began losing mobility in his fingers more recently.

Halli’s Twitter thread regarding the progression of his disability was largely met with support from the tech community and onlookers alike.

Twitter thrives on shares, not just within the social media platform but from partner links all over the Internet. Except on Monday, most of those links stopped working.

For approximately an hour, anyone trying to share recently published articles on Twitter was met with an error message clearly intended for developers:

It was almost as if Twitter was informing publishers that they didn't pay their water bill and, as such, couldn't publish links on the social network.

We didn't have to wait too long for Twitter CEO Elon Musk to explain. In response to a tweet from former Netscape founder and well-known venture capitalist Marc Andreessen pointing out how four of the five top Twitter trends were about Twitter, Musk tweeted, "A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite."

This seemingly clear-headed tweet though should be cause for alarm. Musk claims the code stack (basically a massive stack of programs that all work together to create the Twitter whole) is brittle and needs a rewrite. What he fails to mention is that among the thousands of Twitter employees he laid off since November, a good number of them were engineers and, it's safe to assume, some were in what's known as QA or quality assurance.

Typically if you plan on making any kind of code change to a website, online service, or app, QA tests it on an offline copy of the platform. In this way, they ensure that the updates, no matter how small, won't adversely impact the live environment.

The concept is known as "production," the live site or service, versus "staging," an environment that's identical to live but can not be seen or touched by users. You run your new code or feature through staging, a group of QA testers applies a set of known scenarios (maybe they throw in an edge case or two) and as long as there are no red flags, the update gets pushed from Staging to Production.

Twitter, which has seen its overall reliability drop (from going offline to having features appear and disappear unexpectedly) since Musk took over, may be getting its updates in a different way.

Musk likes to test features on production(opens in new tab) (the live site). As a result, he keeps running into unintended consequences.

There is some disagreement on whether or not there is a Twitter QA team.

Some argue one exists but Musk grows impatient and then pushes untested code live.

Others insist that Elon Musk arrived at Twitter and discovered that Twitter had no QA team and it was long in the practice of pushing untested code live. That though seems highly unlikely.

I asked Musk directly on Twitter if the API update was tested on staging before being pushed live and will update this post if he responds.

Never assume

The assumption he made here, that a small API change would have little impact on the site was a poor one. And, yet, Musk still doesn't understand that he's doing it wrong.

Testing features of any kind on a live version of a complex platform like Twitter will inevitably result in bugs and crashes.

Will rewriting the code stack solve all this? Maybe, but very few platforms stay as clean as they were on launch and even if the rewrite is robust and perfect, frequent updates and fresh features will test that stability.

As long as Musk refuses to fully test what he launches before he launches it, there is no scenario in which Twitter escapes regular downtime.

This is a simple fix, Elon, make QA an inescapable part of the development pipeline and save yourself and us a lot of headaches. Or keep doing it your way because that's working out so, so well