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.

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

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.

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: https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement

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

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...

Too real. 99/100

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?

I won by just grinding and touching grass

RAT RACE #1 · DECEASED* *dead at 25 · $164k unspent · the on-call rotation already updated

“You shipped the Al feature. It is a wrapper around an API wrapper around an API. Stock +9%. You feel nothing.”

Anyone else in the club?

Automatic lifestyle creep with promotions? Well, it's definitely not a FIRE simulator.

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.

It'd be cool to have a mode where you input your current base / age / networth and simulate forward.

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...

I wish I could laugh at this. It hits a little too close

Nice! Had a burnout, a kidney stone and was laid off before even hitting 25! Sounds about right.

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.

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.

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

Shouldn't this be called MAG7 Simulator? /s (a term I'd not really heard much of until a few weeks ago as it doesn't get used around these parts much but elsewhere apparently is a thing)

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.

This re-triggered my FAANG burnout. Thanks.

9.6 mil acquisition cash out we are so back

Heavy drug wars vibe. I love it.

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”

I couldn’t step away from the grind :D very funny game and ngl I want my own Milton in real life

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.

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

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.

RAT RACE #1 · ACQUIRED sold the company at 28 · walked away with $10.17M · peak burnout 100%

only did grinding and side project. got acquired. if it were that simple..

It's accurate because the discretionary equity grant isn't visible in any of the obvious performance metrics.

But you know.

RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 30 · walked away with $14.98M · peak burnout 94%

did i win???

add a dating life status bar

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.

too realistic

My vesting cliff somehow hit after getting fired lol

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.

beautiful

Anyone see how Opus did? lol

Also, eerily accurate timeline!

Now make it 10x more difficult for those not born in the US.

banger

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.

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?

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