> so before aiming for millions aim for 85K. yeah a far cry from the FAANG wage - but one - you will never get laid off.
I very much disagree with this take, and would go so far as to say that unless it's a tiny bootstrapped company with no runway left, and the boss has come around and asked if you'd temporarily take a cut to stay afloat, less money isn't going to win you favours. That, or indeed you are making dramatically more than the company thinks your work is worth to them, but imo it's the perception and relative amount to them that's more important than the number. The amount is just what it costs them to get you to do what they want for them, insomuch as they understand what they want and why it's worth anything.
I've been laid off and/or fired from $40k a year jobs, $150k jobs, and everything in-between. $80k to one company is $300k to another, is a high-end salary in one country or state and a low end salary in another. $150k was likely on the low end relative to my peers, while $40k was high, and $80k was average but they'd agreed to the raise easily. There's no situation I've ever been in where accepting less money in absolute or relative terms would have produced a lower likelihood of losing the job.
Asking for $85k at FAANG just because your expenses or self-esteem are low doesn't seem like it would earn you an exemption from a burnout inducing cycle of work, it would just be a very bad deal for you. Asking for $85k in the midwest is asking to sell your autonomy for $85k. If it's a good deal for you relative to the cost of living is an important question, but ultimately I think whether it's worth it depends both on the finances and whether the things you have to do to keep the boss happy are tolerable or serviceable. If your boss is the type of person to ask for unpaid extra work on the weekend, and you say no, the fact that you get paid $85k isn't going to negate the likelihood for them to start brooding over you not doing as they want, legal or not, unless they have no choice but to keep you.
Layoffs and firings come in many shapes and sizes, but oftentimes the size is large and the shape is whoever feels like they don't have enough control over you. Managers are designed to be anxious and sensitive to risk, which leads them to control, and once they've decided they don't have enough, it doesn't matter how much or how little you're paid even in relative terms, they'll eventually find a reason to get rid of you.
Additionally, managers seem to often have more influence on your job than on how much you're paid for the job, and theirs is to measure and decide things about your responsibilities. If your team likes you, your immediate manager likes you, you're grinding and getting shit done, but one level up decides they don't like you, suddenly you'll find yourself on the ropes.
Only if you seek them out (ski resorts and such). I've lived in both of the most expensive major inland cities (Chicago and Denver) and $85k is plenty in both, even for a small family.
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
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
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...
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.
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.
My experience: I feel like I could 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.
It goes up - quite a lot - if you take promotions.
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.
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.
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
I think this would be a lot more fun if there were different "starting" charasteristics.
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.
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.
No it hasn't. It wasn't until money got involved that anything computers were lucrative. Before there was Airbnb there was the Internet of Couchsurfing.org, where people did things for free out of the kindness of their hearts and for fun. That world is long gone, replaced by OnlyFans and Amazon, cos we all got rent to pay. IBM was the big evil and Apple was the upstart and free and open standards and open source were gonna change the world. They didn't, thru got taken advantage of by corporate forces. If an MBA proposed open source, give away your work for free, and we'll just figure out some magical way to pay you, you'd tell them to get fucked. But because it came out of MIT and a bunch of nerds, it sounded like a good idea.
The magical way to get paid turned out to be advertising, giving us Google and Facebook and their invasions of privacy. If, instead, we'd had a culture of paying people for their time and effort, and not a bunch of freeloaders, who knows how things would look today. Proprietary and locked down, perhaps. But also maybe not?
On the end screen, it shows "Shareholder value created" with some huge number.
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.
It reminds me of the narrative "No matter how bad you think it is, reality is worse."
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.
Working for a bootstrapped startup; that's real value creation because there is enormous risk involved and no engineer wants to take that risk.
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.
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.
Maybe. Probably. It's hard for me to perceive sarcasm these days. I'm becoming just like the neoliberals I used to criticize who gets triggered at the slightest thing haha.
That said, I do think a lot of cynical engineers have a "Rat race" worldview and not the "Hamster wheel" one.
From my perspective, it's like if someone made a joke about genocide. My sarcasm detector switches off. This topic and this game is traumatic to me.
Also, the amount of money which is needed to retire in the game is huge! $1.7 million! I'm not even expecting to reach that at retirement. The fact that someone believes they can get this in a few years of grinding reveals a very cushy worldview...
What I would do for that kind of money...
I've been grinding like insane, nights and weekends for almost 15 years and my net worth is like $200k, 30% of it illiquid in a retirement fund. I never got a bonus, in spite of being called "the best engineer at the company" to my face by the company founder. After asking for a raise, they offered a 2% salary increase... This was a cryptocurrency company with a lot of money to spare.
Just like real life: Alternate moments of grind with moments of "strategic disengagement" (touch grass).
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.
I don't know if I should feel sad or laugh at the pain at the same time lol.
what a wonderful way to reflect reality for a good population of devs.
you can hack the game i.e real life
1. live in a cheaper location 2. do things that don't scale & do the ugly work
that naturally extends your runway, you don't need to apply to YC
remember the median Pay in the US - is 61800 based on ADP the largest payroll provider.
so before aiming for millions aim for 85K. yeah a far cry from the FAANG wage - but one - you will never get laid off.
85K - you can live everywhere besides the coastal US cities comfortably.
Unless you have a family, want to travel, want an ample retirement fund, have complex health issues, etc etc.
> so before aiming for millions aim for 85K. yeah a far cry from the FAANG wage - but one - you will never get laid off.
I very much disagree with this take, and would go so far as to say that unless it's a tiny bootstrapped company with no runway left, and the boss has come around and asked if you'd temporarily take a cut to stay afloat, less money isn't going to win you favours. That, or indeed you are making dramatically more than the company thinks your work is worth to them, but imo it's the perception and relative amount to them that's more important than the number. The amount is just what it costs them to get you to do what they want for them, insomuch as they understand what they want and why it's worth anything.
I've been laid off and/or fired from $40k a year jobs, $150k jobs, and everything in-between. $80k to one company is $300k to another, is a high-end salary in one country or state and a low end salary in another. $150k was likely on the low end relative to my peers, while $40k was high, and $80k was average but they'd agreed to the raise easily. There's no situation I've ever been in where accepting less money in absolute or relative terms would have produced a lower likelihood of losing the job.
Asking for $85k at FAANG just because your expenses or self-esteem are low doesn't seem like it would earn you an exemption from a burnout inducing cycle of work, it would just be a very bad deal for you. Asking for $85k in the midwest is asking to sell your autonomy for $85k. If it's a good deal for you relative to the cost of living is an important question, but ultimately I think whether it's worth it depends both on the finances and whether the things you have to do to keep the boss happy are tolerable or serviceable. If your boss is the type of person to ask for unpaid extra work on the weekend, and you say no, the fact that you get paid $85k isn't going to negate the likelihood for them to start brooding over you not doing as they want, legal or not, unless they have no choice but to keep you.
Layoffs and firings come in many shapes and sizes, but oftentimes the size is large and the shape is whoever feels like they don't have enough control over you. Managers are designed to be anxious and sensitive to risk, which leads them to control, and once they've decided they don't have enough, it doesn't matter how much or how little you're paid even in relative terms, they'll eventually find a reason to get rid of you.
Additionally, managers seem to often have more influence on your job than on how much you're paid for the job, and theirs is to measure and decide things about your responsibilities. If your team likes you, your immediate manager likes you, you're grinding and getting shit done, but one level up decides they don't like you, suddenly you'll find yourself on the ropes.
> so before aiming for millions aim for 85K. yeah a far cry from the FAANG wage - but one - you will never get laid off.
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
> 85K - you can live everywhere besides the coastal US cities comfortably.
This is far from true. There are plenty of expensive places to live away from the coasts
Only if you seek them out (ski resorts and such). I've lived in both of the most expensive major inland cities (Chicago and Denver) and $85k is plenty in both, even for a small family.
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
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
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?
It'd be cool to have a mode where you input your current base / age / networth and simulate forward.
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
like family/personal time balance... neglect, and you get a message your teenage daughter is pregnant or your son joined a gang. game chugs along...
...and then you just get fired one day.
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.
Unexpected given what I know second-hand about the valley - which is to grind leetcode and keep job hopping.
2 replies →
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
/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.
My experience: I feel like I could 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.
Automatic lifestyle creep with promotions? Well, it's definitely not a FIRE simulator.
I won by just grinding and touching grass
I’ve had dates like that
sad reality of life
Sounds like someone who has never touched grass. ;-p
1 reply →
banger
my screen too short vertically - I didn't realize there's a whole half of the game hidden from me
RAT RACE #1 · DECEASED* *dead at 25 · $164k unspent · the on-call rotation already updated
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
add a dating life status bar
[delayed]
Nice! Had a burnout, a kidney stone and was laid off before even hitting 25! Sounds about right.
The FIRE net worth seems unrealistically low.
It goes up - quite a lot - if you take promotions.
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.
RAT RACE #1 · ACQUIRED sold the company at 27 · walked away with $13.32M · peak burnout 84%
Gotta go grind out some AI B2B Agentic project now...
The hard part for B2B is the sales not tech. You are better off wining and dining a sales guy as your co founder than doing more vibe coding.
The hard part is even knowing what someone would pay for. I don't know if a sales guy knows that or not.
1 reply →
I try to resist the urge to vibecode, but yes agree on sales
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.
Just use Chrome like a normal person.
That was sarcasm. On the other hand, it is certainly a normal experience to have to use Chrome for reasons like this.
"How come Google keeps making Chrome shittier :^(" - People who say this
1 reply →
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%
That was fun. Side-projected spam, touched grass once, YC, Side-project one more time, launch, acquired.
RAT RACE #1 · ACQUIRED sold the company at 25 · walked away with $13.13M · peak burnout 93%
Same strategy, seems to be the winning one.
I couldn’t step away from the grind :D very funny game and ngl I want my own Milton in real life
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
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
Depends in which part of California
Goes pretty far in Weed, for example.
Heavy drug wars vibe. I love it.
I originally wasn't going to try it -but now I have to!
I think this would be a lot more fun if there were different "starting" charasteristics.
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.
Also advance game by 1 month instead of 3 months.
> Poverty, but extremely high tolerance for burnout.
Slanting toward the fantasy genre here.
I escaped! Just grind until you hit 80% burnout then touch grass to bring it back down. Rinse repeat.
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 30 · walked away with $14.98M · peak burnout 94%
did i win???
RAT RACE #1 · ACQUIRED sold the company at 28 · walked away with $10.17M · peak burnout 100%
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.
only did grinding and side project. got acquired. if it were that simple..
beautiful
Man, I hate that tech has just become money. Content like this perpetuates it.
... it always has been?
It's youthful exuberance that can pretend it was ever anything else.
No it hasn't. It wasn't until money got involved that anything computers were lucrative. Before there was Airbnb there was the Internet of Couchsurfing.org, where people did things for free out of the kindness of their hearts and for fun. That world is long gone, replaced by OnlyFans and Amazon, cos we all got rent to pay. IBM was the big evil and Apple was the upstart and free and open standards and open source were gonna change the world. They didn't, thru got taken advantage of by corporate forces. If an MBA proposed open source, give away your work for free, and we'll just figure out some magical way to pay you, you'd tell them to get fucked. But because it came out of MIT and a bunch of nerds, it sounded like a good idea.
The magical way to get paid turned out to be advertising, giving us Google and Facebook and their invasions of privacy. If, instead, we'd had a culture of paying people for their time and effort, and not a bunch of freeloaders, who knows how things would look today. Proprietary and locked down, perhaps. But also maybe not?
/rant.
My vesting cliff somehow hit after getting fired lol
I have a friend who got laid off and had that happen.
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.
Sounds about right for someone who was born in the late 70s and got in in the 90s.
too realistic
Now make it 10x more difficult for those not born in the US.
Maybe you haven't seen the state of things in the US lately...
On the end screen, it shows "Shareholder value created" with some huge number.
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.
It reminds me of the narrative "No matter how bad you think it is, reality is worse."
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.
Working for a bootstrapped startup; that's real value creation because there is enormous risk involved and no engineer wants to take that risk.
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.
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.
Or maybe it is just sarcasm.
Maybe. Probably. It's hard for me to perceive sarcasm these days. I'm becoming just like the neoliberals I used to criticize who gets triggered at the slightest thing haha.
That said, I do think a lot of cynical engineers have a "Rat race" worldview and not the "Hamster wheel" one.
From my perspective, it's like if someone made a joke about genocide. My sarcasm detector switches off. This topic and this game is traumatic to me.
Also, the amount of money which is needed to retire in the game is huge! $1.7 million! I'm not even expecting to reach that at retirement. The fact that someone believes they can get this in a few years of grinding reveals a very cushy worldview...
What I would do for that kind of money...
I've been grinding like insane, nights and weekends for almost 15 years and my net worth is like $200k, 30% of it illiquid in a retirement fund. I never got a bonus, in spite of being called "the best engineer at the company" to my face by the company founder. After asking for a raise, they offered a 2% salary increase... This was a cryptocurrency company with a lot of money to spare.
1 reply →
Just like real life: Alternate moments of grind with moments of "strategic disengagement" (touch grass).
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.
No option for the rat to bite you, you get rabiz, sue and cash out?