IMO it really doesn't have to be promotion-eager engineers or antsy product managers. I'm fairly satisfied with my role and comp and work type with where my career/life-stage is. I just did a code release first thing this morning, not because I am promotion-eager, but just because I'm picking back up where I left off, like any normal day. Granted I work at a much smaller company than Slack with orders of magnitude less traffic.

HN's tolerance for jokes and sarcasm is extremely low.

I'm not sure about that. I feel like I get more upvotes from sarcasm and jokes than from insight. In this instance, I think it's because when people hear something dumb said seriously in real life, they're not going to readily recognize online that it's a joke.

Yeah, Poe’s law applies here. That’s definitely something someone less informed might say in earnest.

Yeah, there was other thread about Uber, where similar sentiment was seriously debated there, so I didn't recognise this as sarcasm either.