He is still an anonymous dude to me.

HN Profile -> Personal Website -> LinkedIn -> Over 10 years experience as Google Site Reliability Engineer

Is the LinkedIn profile linking back to the hn account?

Security Engineer asking?

Ha, no. It just occured to me that any random hacker news account could link to somebody's personal account and claim authority on some subject.

Google SRE for 10 years, ending as the Principal Site Reliability Engineer (L8).

s/the//

Google has more than 1 L8 SRE.

I don't know who either he or you are, so...

I was clarifying his comment, since he didn't mention that this is not a guess, but inside knowledge.

I was not trying to establish a trust chain.

Take from it what you will.

Why does it matter if he's guessing or not?

Because, it may shock you to know, but sometimes people just go on the Internet and tell lies.

No shit Google has plans in place for outages.

But what are these plans, are they any good... a respected industry figure who's CV includes being at Google for 10 years doesn't need to go into detail describing the IRC fallback to be believed and trusted that there is such a thing.

I've found that when I post things I learned on the job here it actually causes people to tell me I'm wrong or made it up even more often…

It's kind of amusing given that employers are usually pretty easy to deduce based on comments…

That's just an 'appeal to authority'.

No-one knows or cares who made the statement, it may as well have been 'water is wet', it was useless and adds nothing but noise.

I found a comment that was factually incorrect and I felt competent to comment on that. Regrettably, I wrote just one sentence and clicked reply without providing any credentials to back up my claim. Not that I try to hide my identity, as danhak pointed out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28751644, my full name and URL of my personal website are only a click away.

I have replied to my initial comment with provide some additonal context: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=28752431. Hope that helps.

That’s…not what “appeal to authority” means.