[bduerst]

Job level. At Google the different job roles are separated into ladders, with the number representing the how high you've climbed. IC6 isn't director level but it's far from entry-level. Invoking their job level like this at the opening of their comment is an appeal to authority.

Edit: This comment is being misunderstood. Not saying it's a fallacy - appealing to authority is not always illogical.

[ultraluminous]

The GP is providing their personal insider view regarding what they perceived as mismanagement of G+, and is starting of with describing the vantage the had at the time. There are many (many) instances of appeal-to-authority on HN, but this is just plain `ol context.

Apologies if I read too much into your comment, but Appeal to Authority is a name of a logical fallacy and ascribes some sort of intellectual failure to the poster, when there's clearly none.

[horsawlarway]

I don't see it as an appeal to authority but rather as context.

There's quite a bit of context shift as you go up the ladder within an organization. The reason "why" something happened often looks very different from different perspectives.

[jjeaff]

A tangent, but a true "appeal to authority" would be using the fact that someone is an expert on a subject as the evidence for the assertions. I don't think merely mentioning that you or your source is an expert of a subject is necessarily an appeal to authority falacy.

In this case they provide their opinion and then provide the reasons and evidence for their reasoning.

[mikestew]

It's not an "appeal to authority", it's a qualification to speak on the subject. I used to work at Microsoft, but why would you care about my guess as to the internal workings of the Google+ team?