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.