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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

I find it really hard to feel sorry for the person who grew up in a 55,000 sq ft house and went to boarding school. It's highly likely that she and her family are so wealthy she never needs to work a day in her life, so she treats the whole thing like a game.

From the verge article:

"Korey, for her part, didn’t have to work hard to project an aspirational lifestyle. The CEO grew up in Ohio in a 55,000-square-foot historic mansion with an indoor swimming pool and three dining rooms. She’d gone to boarding school, then landed in Bloomingdale’s executive development program while at Brown University"

Go breed Arabian racehorses or something, lady, stop cracking the whip on $40k a year peons.

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Personal attacks are not ok on HN. Maybe you don't owe "lady" better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. This sort of comment is basically just the primate feces-hurling game—it's a mechanical response, and doesn't count as interesting in the sense that the site guidelines use that word.

There may well be a good comment to be made on behalf of the employees of the company, but this is not that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thanks for the feedback. It's probably best to have the comment deleted. I have a strong and visceral reaction to seeing somebody from a background of wealth and privilege force extremely low paid workers (in NYC, no less) into 80 hour work weeks. But that definitely came out the wrong way.

There is probably a more productive discussion to be had about labor laws, overtime pay and the disparity in net worth between CEOs and persons trying to live on 40k a year in New York, but that clearly wasn't it.

That makes a lot of sense and I appreciate the response.

do you not think the reporter put that in the story to induce you as the reader to have this very reaction?

i think her actions were wrong, but i also think this setup at the beginning of the story has nothing to do with the actual issue at all and was meant to turn readers on the CEO from the get go before you had even read anything about what she had actually done.

The reality is that many successful high profile founders, including Gates/Zuckerberg/Spiegel came from wealthy backgrounds. It speaks more to the power of a strong social safety net when it comes to entrepreneurship than anything else, but shouldn’t by itself make you hate someone.

Given all the other reprehensible stuff in the article, the bit about her background seemed like an unnecessary potshot. The very next sentence is "But for all of her privilege, no one denied the executive’s fanatical work ethic." But, it's split from the paragraph about her upbringing and it looks like some readers didn't make it that far.

This is a disturbing comment to me, aside from the subtle (or not so subtle) sexism in the last line.

Inherently, racism, sexism, etc. is when we discriminate against or judge someone based on the "group" to which they belong, or worse, based on a stereotype of the group they belong to, whether that group is defined by race, sexuality, culture, or social economic class.

It would be a fair comment to say one doesn't feel sorry for Korey because her predicament was brought on by her unacceptable behavior. However, it's quite another thing to not feel sorry for her simply because of her perceived social economic class. It sounds like something you'd read in an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book, uttered by a proletariat after a "rich" farmer (i.e. bourgeoisie) was murdered and his farm taken.

Let's put away the pitchforks. *Edit: Missed word

Why can’t someone be judged according to their lived material conditions? Also, Solzhenitsyn defecated more compelling arguments than this.

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