Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

Butterfield (one of the founders of Flickr, and later, Slack) is quite a character.

He and Caterina (Fake, the other co-founder of Flickr) were working on a game, a so-called "Game Never Ending" when they realized that they needed to come up with a way for people to store screenshots and share them. Thus, Flickr was born (this is why some URLs in Flickr had ".gne" extensions).

Yahoo acquired Flicker in 2005, and a few years later, both Butterfield and Fake left.

Butterfield then went back to his game. In the process of developing the game, he realized that he needed a good, reliable chat system: and hence Slack was born.

I wonder if he's back working on the game, which, really seems like a "game never ending" for him...

View on HN

I interviewed for an engineer role at Flickr right after they were acquired by Yahoo. It was a full day grueling interview in one of the San Jose towers with all the originals, Cal, Allspaw, Kellan, etc.

The last interview was with Stewart. He walked in with his laptop and pulled up my resume and saw that I was from Texas. He asked if I'd ever been to Marfa. He then asked if I'd ever been to El Paso. He then asked if I'd ever heard the song El Paso by Marty Robbins. We then sat there and listened to El Paso for the entire song. Then we made some more chit-chat and that was the end of my interview.

I didn't get the gig but I did find out my flight back to DFW was first class so that was nice.

This reads like an episode from Silicon Valley.

>El Paso

That seems surreal. Maybe by that point Stewart figured that anyone passed through to him had the technical chops, and the rest was about personality & culture fit?

What does knowing this song mean about your personality and culture fit ?

This song in particular? Not much. The entire conversation, assuming it was more than 5 minutes of listening to the song? Perhaps whether or not you can get along with the person. I'm not saying that's what was going on: I think it's entirely possible that it was just some general weirdness. Or Stewart had already decided the person wasn't getting the job & wasn't going to waste time on tech talk when they could have a pleasant conversation about something else. I don't know, but I think there are other plausible explanations than the "weirdness" one. But massively wealthy tech founders are often an odd bunch, so "weirdness" certainly wouldn't surprise me.

I had a (very) small part in it -- in 2001, I was chatting with Caterina, and recommended the book "Finite and Infinite Games" by James Carse. She then recommended it to Stewart, who found in it at least one of his inspirations for GNE.

Great little book, had it recommended to me by a fantastic music teacher of mine in graduate school.

Genuinely interested in hearing what other people get out of it. I couldn't get past Carse's overwrought use of chiasmus. After finally reaching the end, he places a coy little phrase which falls flat because he spilled the beans 66 sections earlier and it irks me to this day.

I agree that the prose and structure is not the strong point.

I appreciated it for giving a clearly articulated alternative to zero sum competitive games. It helped me think about the playfulness of cooperative creativity in a new more holistic way, as well as the idea that it’s worth doing things that you’ll never reach an end of.

I don’t doubt that if I read it again I’d share your criticisms though, it’s a thin volume with a very sweet idea at the core of it, at the end of the day.

imagine an alternate universe where flickr and slack are just part of a "Game Never Ending"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com