I don't know if I should feel sad or laugh at the pain at the same time lol.<p>what a wonderful way to reflect reality for a good population of devs.<p>you can hack the game i.e real life<p>1. live in a cheaper location
2. do things that don't scale & do the ugly work<p>that naturally extends your runway, you don't need to apply to YC<p>remember the median Pay in the US - is 61800 based on ADP the largest payroll provider.<p>so before aiming for millions aim for 85K. yeah a far cry from the FAANG wage - but one - you will never get laid off.<p>85K - you can live everywhere besides the coastal US cities comfortably.
The last 2 statements are so far from reality it's insane. I live in the south/the midwest (depending on who you ask) in an okay-sized city, I was a SWE making $85k/year gross and struggling to cover housing and bills, and I got laid off when the company "eliminated my position".
I remember taking pay cuts of 35-65% for a few jobs I thought sounded more cool or less stressful when I was younger, only to find out some of my coworkers were making far more at the same place. They placed me still at or above the median wage, and I learned a lot (I never vested, and stocks weren't a factor in the jobs).<p>In my personal experience, the jobs I have taken which paid less treated me as cheaper and more disposable. This is not to say all companies are like this, and indeed many do value tech employees they could not afford otherwise more, but making a blanket statement about any pay figure is sort of a bad idea.<p>The FAANG workplace environment is something you will pay for. There are reasons it pays well, and I never really understood this until I left. I do not mean merely 'doing your job'.<p>As for the last part of your reply, I am guessing it was meant to get reactionary replies (touché).
I've found that when I was making $85k I was just as miserable as when I was making $200k+ at FAANG, just without the money. The corporate politics and shittiness of being an employee were the exact same. At least, I was living in a VHCOL city.
Unless you have a family, want to travel, want an ample retirement fund, have complex health issues, etc etc.
> 1. live in a cheaper location 2. do things that don't scale & do the ugly work<p>From the creators of how to draw the owl, lol!
> 85K - you can live everywhere besides the coastal US cities comfortably.<p>This is far from true. There are plenty of expensive places to live away from the coasts
It actually really hurt when I pulled up the page. It's why I'm trying to bootstrap my own software company off of my savings.<p>I'm aiming for 85k (or there abouts) after a few years of earning nothing. But I can't help but feel like a failure because distribution and convincing people to use my software is extremely difficult. I don't want to go back to the tech industry but at the same time I don't know if I have it in me to go "yeah, I'm still working on my <insert dream here> but I have 0 - 10 users" for the next few years.
I wish. I live in the midwest in a stable but unsexy city (probably around like 50th biggest in the nation? So recognizable but not particularly major). 85k is pretty painful here.
> so before aiming for millions aim for 85K. yeah a far cry from the FAANG wage - but one - you will never get laid off.<p>People making 85K absolutely get laid off.
1 is not an option for a lot of us in geographically tied roles that are infrequently fully remote
Maybe add a non-US-citizen mode where if you are ever unemployed for more than 2 cycles you lose, unless you already have a side project with enormous traction<p>And if you are a US citizen and get randomly get thrown into a group of mostly non-citizen coworkers they will grind like hell due to the above, and if you don't grind extra hard you get the PIP faster, because you're stack ranked against them
When thinking about years of work until financial independence, its worth understanding the impact that savings rate has - the fraction of post-tax income remaining to invest in growth assets after expenses.<p>If you're not familiar with savings rate, here's a simple calculator to help build intuition. The assumptions of asset returns & portfolio required to sustain retirement are a bit optimistic, but it's directionally correct: <a href="https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement" rel="nofollow">https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement</a><p>You need roughly a 15% savings rate to support traditional retirement age. If you're fortunate enough to create & sustain a situation where your income net tax is a lot higher than your annual expenses, the timeline accelerates significantly.
Really fun project, but doesn't take ageism into account, it gets easier the further you get whereas it should get be getting harder in certain ways
The rate of success of side projects seems unrealistically high. Yeah, I know, it's the YC dream, but even acquisitions where the founders walk away with a few million dollars are rare enough, right?
Game seems to be heavily weighted towards building side projects. If only you could build a single side project without raising any funds and get acquired for 10M with an 80% cut...
Really? I did great just alternating between "grind" and "lay low". Retired with $4.8m at 25!
This seemed to work best.<p>Unexpected given what I know second-hand about the valley - which is to grind leetcode and keep job hopping.
I finished it the first time by just hitting "grind" until burnout got above 80% and then hitting "touch grass" until burnout got down below 30%, repeat until win. It actually feels like my current job.
Well thats your problem, everyone knows you got to apply to YC to get funded<p>/s
this is possible now with AI
In all seriousness, where are these stories? There are so many "entrepreneurs" vibing away, but who is getting paid? I feel like there should have been some decent exits by now but all I've found are a few lifestyle businesses and a lot of hucksters.<p>My experience: I feel like I <i>could</i> build a real product solo much more quickly than ever before, but the reality is my side-projects have been mostly futzing around with coding agents and related infrastructure - like building my own command proxy system with LLM review/classification & deterministic approval policy - for sandboxed agents to manage cloud infrastructure in controlled ways - building the builder who never builds. I see a lot of that kind of stuff on Twitter too.
Because code was never the bottleneck.
from a business standpoint, PMF was never about the underlying software. It’s a developer’s wet dream to toil away in a garage toward some Technical ideal, and then have the world applaud their genius and shower them with money.<p>Now to be fair, there are windows of time where that really did happen for some few. As a craftsman developer, I have the same wet dream. The problem is I know it’s just a dream now that I’m older.<p>So what AI has done is condense the frame in which a developer can spend years toiling away in the belief that they just need to keep going. Now the feedback loop is more instantly connected to reality and the reality is most all this stuff nobody wants or needs. starting a business now is ironically about all the business bits and that’s just rather annoying for builders like the HN crowd, myself included. This is more cathartic than anything. What do I know about entrepreneurial success?
I won by just grinding and touching grass
RAT RACE #1 · DECEASED*
*dead at 25 · $164k unspent · the on-call rotation already updated
It'd be cool to have a mode where you input your current base / age / networth and simulate forward.
Automatic lifestyle creep with promotions? Well, it's definitely not a FIRE simulator.
This re-triggered my FAANG burnout. Thanks.
Neat, but font choice makes it extremely hard to read the text on mobile. Even harder when it's under the CRT style screen effect.
I wish I could laugh at this. It hits a little too close
my screen too short vertically - I didn't realize there's a whole half of the game hidden from me
The FIRE net worth seems unrealistically low.
It goes up - quite a lot - if you take promotions.<p>But, back in the day FIRE used to mean something beyond just being rich - there was an anti-consumerist bent (and expectation that you'd move away from your expensive city/former job) that usually went along with lower spending.
Not if you're selling your house in "muh good school district" to the next sucker and retiring to <shuffles cards> Idaho.
Nice! Had a burnout, a kidney stone and was laid off before even hitting 25! Sounds about right.
RAT RACE #1 · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 27 · walked away with $13.32M · peak burnout 84%<p>Gotta go grind out some AI B2B Agentic project now...
y38q3 metaphase wants to buy me out for 500mm, my cut is 700k. my portion of the cuts get smaller as time goes on. final net worth 2.50mm. i either retired or died at 60
I'm not sure what the run it back button is doing, but it consistently manages to cause a graphical bug where all of my open firefox windows fully grey out until I refocus on them. Never seen that before.
I like how retirement progress is tracked in a "freedom bar". I have heard that amount of money being described with a different f-word.
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 25 · walked away with $7.36M · peak burnout 71%<p>That was fun. Side-projected spam, touched grass once, YC, Side-project one more time, launch, acquired.
Man, I hate that tech has just become money. Content like this perpetuates it.
I love how mind said “the offer says it’s the beginning of a journey but it’s actually a wheel”
9.6 mil acquisition cash out we are so back
I think the strategy of grinding and rising young works well (as it does in life) that way you have the "padding" to handle a layoff or a period of touching grass.<p>Also (so far) layoffs + severance have been good. They work well in the game too - take the severance, touch grass and leet code, get a new job
It's accurate because the discretionary equity grant isn't visible in any of the obvious performance metrics.<p>But you know.
I couldn’t step away from the grind :D very funny game and ngl I want my own Milton in real life
Heavy drug wars vibe. I love it.
I think this would be a lot more fun if there were different "starting" charasteristics.<p>High starting money, but low tolerance for burnout.
Poverty, but extremely high tolerance for burnout.
Can't find a job debuff.
Low skill, grifter, false promises, lie to win. (Rolling chance to end up in prison).
High skill start, low tolerance for burnout.
ADHD debuff.
Picking the opposite option of what you want debuff.<p>Also advance game by 1 month instead of 3 months.
add a dating life status bar
RAT RACE #1 · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 28 · walked away with $10.17M · peak burnout 100%
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 30 · walked away with $14.98M · peak burnout 94%<p>did i win???
only did grinding and side project. got acquired. if it were that simple..
Whether you can score a remote gig without a cost-of-living penalty affects your ability to achieve FIRE. If you're in the Bay Area at only $200K, you're on a treadmill.
I escaped! Just grind until you hit 80% burnout then touch grass to bring it back down. Rinse repeat.
Anyone see how Opus did? lol<p>Also, eerily accurate timeline!
too realistic
My vesting cliff somehow hit after getting fired lol
beautiful
Laid off at 49 as a L8 Principal with 402% freedom bux in the bank at $9.8m net worth and $0.9M/yr with nothing but grinding and touching grass.<p>Sounds about right for someone who was born in the late 70s and got in in the 90s.
Now make it 10x more difficult for those not born in the US.
banger
Just like real life: Alternate moments of grind with moments of "strategic disengagement" (touch grass).<p>Accepted a voluntary leave with a generous severance, then, used the cushion to ship relentless on side project. Ended up with 7.1 M offer that netted me 6.7 million.
On the end screen, it shows "Shareholder value created" with some huge number.<p>I find this unsettling because it hints that the people who built this game are more naive than I am. And this is a game about a cynical topic.<p>It reminds me of the narrative "No matter how bad you think it is, reality is worse."<p>The idea that the engineer is creating "shareholder value" is part of the conditioning. They're creating complexity and literally running a hamster wheel. Even more so than the game suggests. Lighting fires and putting them out. They are lucky to have this job where you can get away with this kind of pure performative engineering. Seriously, Netflix looks exactly the same as it did years ago. Same with Facebook. The fact that they have so many users and make so much money has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with attention monopolization and incentive structures among investors to circulate money between companies that they have a stake in.<p>Working for a bootstrapped startup; that's real value creation because there is enormous risk involved and no engineer wants to take that risk.<p>Of course the value creation goes away as soon as the startup raises funding because then they become part of the club and the risk is taken out.<p>Working for FAANG is more like being appointed to the king's court. The king's fool is not creating any economic value for the average working citizen... And the line for that job is long. Being chosen is not based on skill or talent. Talent is abundant. It's a kind of lottery.
No option for the rat to bite you, you get rabiz, sue and cash out?
That was fun! Although I was automatically retired, with $1.7M in net worth. That’s hardly enough, especially in California. Maybe the game should ask for a goal number before starting