I guess it was easy for me. Before becoming CTO at VMware, I was Senior Technology Evangelist at AWS, and was very well known in the Cloud Computing space. I met a ton of startups and larger companies, mostly on the technical side, so I knew a lot of people.
I also helped many of them a lot during my years at AWS, and most of them were very eager to give me a hand / provide advice.
"They/Them" would be appropriate if we didn't know the person's gender or if they were specifically non-binary. However, in this case, we do know that this specific person is "he/him" thanks to the username and public profile, so the comment parent to yours was appropriate and your comment less so.
(Your comment is less appropriate because the analogy would be if you said: "Nice to meet you, Jim. Not all people in your position are men, though.")
I'm a he/him, but I take no offense if people think I'm a she/her, given that my first name (Simone) can be both feminine and masculine, depending on the culture/background. (I'm Italian, in Italy it's only masculine)
Simone as a feminine or masculine name depends on the language and country. Simone in French is feminine, and in Italian (so a reasonable interpretation here given the last name) is masculine. In the US (and, from what I've seen, other English speaking countries) the name is brought in from French and generally considered feminine (barring being in an Italian community, I've met a couple Simone <Italian last name> men, but often the name becomes Simon after a generation or two in the US for men like how Roberto or Juan will become Robert or John for Spanish-language immigrant families).
I can't tell if this is typical hn pedantry or genuine misunderstanding, so I'll point out that I was not referring to "some entity named Simone", I was referring to the particular Simone in this very comment thread, for whom we have strong evidence about preferred pronouns.
> Of course, it's still safer to look them up if you don't actually know the person in question and want to use he or she.
