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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. It breaks the site guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Note this one: Be kind.

It's hard enough for people to hear criticism or fix mistakes without their head, or a colleague's head, being called for.

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The OP said they felt the person should be reassigned. This is hardly a call for termination. It was also accompanied by constructive points about productivity software relevant to the post at hand. I do not believe there was anything unkind in suggesting that maybe the person was in over their head.

I agree it's much better than saying explicitly they should be fired or (as internet users often do) worse. Still, there's no need to get personal. Organizational failures are almost never one person's doing, and having an indignant thread sitting at #1 talking about how ugly your baby is is punishment already.

The rest of the GP comment was fine.

It's in their ultimate best interest to find a new vocation. You can't just hit undo or tab out of this one.

That's for them to decide, not for HN users to prescribe. Internet commenters underestimate the impact their personal comments have on the targeted person by at least 10x. It's just not nice.

It's unlikely that the person in question is reading this HN thread, but there's a chance that they are, and that means we should do better.

Being a lead at a company as high profile as Slack carries a lot of weight career wise. These people can take it and probably thrive off of it.

These people? You can justify anything that way.

Here's the thing: maybe we don't owe "a lead at a company as high profile at Slack" any better, but we owe ourselves better in order to have a decent community. That's what https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html is about.

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