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.
aliteraryhigh 14 hours ago [-]
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".
dzonga 3 hours ago [-]
85K via independent means. not salary.
once you get to 85K whether via consulting, your own apps etc - you don't get laid off in case I wasn't clear.
pinkmuffinere 5 hours ago [-]
85k should definitely cover your expenses. You can rent out a bedroom instead of a house. Buy a cheap car. Eat canned beans. Even in SF, it’s doable on 85k.
wil421 4 hours ago [-]
Most people didn’t go to college to eat canned beans. We went to college so we could stop eating canned beans.
aleph_minus_one 1 hours ago [-]
> Most people didn’t go to college to eat canned beans. We went to college so we could stop eating canned beans.
Dreaming of something does not make it real.
Even in Germany, where going to university is very cheap, people have such dreams of social ascent by getting a degree. Here is a German article about how this does not always go well:
I like canned beans because sometimes I forget to soak the ones in the bag.
chirau 14 hours ago [-]
How much was/is your rent per month? And how many dependents?
iririririr 6 hours ago [-]
low end rent is now normalized across de nation. there's no escape from the race.
jambalaya8 14 hours ago [-]
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).
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.
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'.
As for the last part of your reply, I am guessing it was meant to get reactionary replies (touché).
vjvjvjvjghv 11 hours ago [-]
“ In my personal experience, the jobs I have taken which paid less treated me as cheaper and more disposable. ”
That’s my experience. The more I have made in my career, the better and with more respect I got treated. As freelance I did some projects with non profit “do gooders”. They didn’t pay well and treated people horribly. On the other hand, successful companies will treat you well and pay well.
wojciii 9 hours ago [-]
I worked for all kinds of companies. They all treated me as a disposable resource. There is no difference beyond the amount of money they pay me. This is in Scandinavia so that might be different from what you experience in your part of our world.
tasuki 8 hours ago [-]
Perhaps you just didn't push it far enough: I took a 90% pay cut and am happy with it :)
Muromec 4 hours ago [-]
The happiest a was when our entire team was laid off and my whole balance was 10k dollars and I went on to live off that from r a year and a half in Thailand.
nixon_why69 12 hours ago [-]
Is it possible that the causation is the other way? FAANG doesn't pay well because its dispiriting and toxic, its toxic because it pays well. This attracts all sorts of behavior.
I mean, it paid well in the early-mid 2010s also and was way less toxic.
jakevoytko 11 hours ago [-]
Out of curiosity, what has changed over time that has made it more toxic? I left Google in 2015.
It certainly had its share of toxic traits, but it was at the "what place doesn't?" level.
nixon_why69 10 hours ago [-]
My feeling was multiple generations of optimizing for promo packets had made the entire culture cynical at G and Amazon. It's one thing when people give lip service to the right things but sometimes the wrong things are rewarded. It hits another level when leaders are actively coaching and advocating cynicism. Throw in layoff fear on top of that and now it's a political mess.
Hydraulix989 13 hours ago [-]
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.
azinman2 15 hours ago [-]
Unless you have a family, want to travel, want an ample retirement fund, have complex health issues, etc etc.
hirvi74 12 hours ago [-]
Not entirely true. I work in "boring" State government as a programmer. I constantly see juniors starting private industry jobs at close to what I make after being with my employer for 10 years straight.
However, money is not everything to me. While the salary is not truly impressive, my job has a lot of benefits. People sleep on these jobs while chasing MegaCorp clout which is cool and all, but I am just a redneck clever enough to write bad code. I don't want FAANG, and FAANG doesn't want me.
> Unless you have a family, want to travel
We have generous PTO, sick leave, bereavement leave, 6 weeks of paternity leave for mothers AND fathers, 16 holidays off, etc.. Plus, many offices are 100% remote (mine is 3/5 days a week).
> want an ample retirement fund
I have a Pension, 401k, and a 457(b) all through my employer. I am fortunate that the pension is also fully funded for over 30 years in advance. Plus, PTO rolls into sick time annual and sick time can be used to purchase service time, thus one can retire even faster than the typical 30 year timeframe.
> have complex health issues
We have great health insurance plans, and my office has been wonderful in dealing with people with very complex health issues. Way more than what I expect the private industry would do.
Guess how many people have been laid off from my office? ;)
Its fairly simple to do the math and see that outside faang a few mill is being left on the table every 5-10 years
duskdozer 5 hours ago [-]
If you have complex health issues then I think you're much less likely to be able to tolerate a FAANG type job.
lupire 9 hours ago [-]
How much is your life worth?
hirvi74 8 hours ago [-]
That assumes one has the chops to get into FAANG. I highly doubt I could pass a basic interview -- even with ample time to prepare. Besides, if I were truly anything special, then I am sure one of the FAANG companies would have tried to contact me already.
Sure, if one was FAANG caliber, then a few mill would be left on the table periodically. However, when is enough ever enough? I seriously feel like I do not need millions to be happy in life.
OhSoHumble 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
matheusmoreira 3 hours ago [-]
> yeah, I'm still working on my <insert dream here> but I have 0 - 10 users
That hit pretty hard...
simultsop 8 hours ago [-]
try doing premium themes or plugins on bigger platforms, than gravitate to your core item
thejazzman 11 hours ago [-]
solidarity; i'm right there with you.
MeetingsBrowser 15 hours ago [-]
> 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
daemonologist 15 hours ago [-]
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.
dreamcompiler 10 hours ago [-]
How long ago was this? In the last 5 years rent has increased dramatically in many of the historically LCOL cities.
api 12 hours ago [-]
Honestly these days even the MCOL (medium cost of living) interior cities like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Charlotte, etc. would be tight on 85K especially with any dependents.
Our family lived in HCOL places like Boston and LA before returning to Cincinnati a few years ago. It’s still cheaper than those but wow… I remember it being a lot cheaper when I left. Since we returned it’s gone up even more. Some neighborhoods went up by as much as 25% in the last 5 years and are not coming down.
I’ve been convinced for years that the inflation numbers are cooked. Or at least “massaged.” I don’t understand how people with only near median salaries live. It’s amazing there aren’t riots.
hattmall 10 hours ago [-]
And yet, the majority of people in those cities make less than that amount. Like Charlotte the median HOUSEHOLD income is $82K. Median wage is ~$53k. As someone making below the median, I don't understand how people are making so much more money and not feeling rich. We have house, boat, golf carts, kids in private school, decent cars, take multiple vacations. We didn't even get lucky and buy cheap housing with low interest, our interest rate is 7.5%. We certainly aren't stacking lots of savings and sometimes have to juggle bills, but we have a lot going on and aren't even making the median right now. But once you drop much below our level, if you don't own anything you actually get a lot of assistance.
thedrexster 4 hours ago [-]
>> house, boat, golf carts, kids in private school, decent cars, take multiple vacations
PNW dweller here, ^^^ this feels _insane_. average private school tuition for a single child is above $25k, nevermind kids pural! :O
api 39 minutes ago [-]
Midwest here. It is insane. Private school isn’t much cheaper here. I’d have to see the numbers or I call BS.
senordevnyc 13 hours ago [-]
How many kids did you have when making $85k in Denver?
gdhvkkk 12 hours ago [-]
Just as important is when.
In 2000, very possible
In 2010, probable
In 2026, unlikely
15 hours ago [-]
myk9001 13 hours ago [-]
> 1. live in a cheaper location 2. do things that don't scale & do the ugly work
From the creators of how to draw the owl, lol!
14 hours ago [-]
20after4 12 hours ago [-]
Cost of living has risen dramatically everywhere. Unless you live in a small town in a poor state like I do then 85K sounds pretty bad. That's barely above the poverty line at this point.
djaro 4 hours ago [-]
The median household income in the US is like 83K, which means half of all households survive with less than that. And most households have two earners.
Even New York City has a median household income of ~80K. Half of all households in NYC survive on that.
matheusmoreira 3 hours ago [-]
Nobody wants to just "survive" though. We want to live.
hirvi74 12 hours ago [-]
I do not make a ton more than that, and I live in the downtown area of the largest city in my southern state. I still am able to save about 30%-40% of my gross income every year, pay my bills, etc..
I think too many people just have poor spending habits (or children).
12 hours ago [-]
overgard 14 hours ago [-]
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.
14 hours ago [-]
stbtrax 15 hours ago [-]
1 is not an option for a lot of us in geographically tied roles that are infrequently fully remote
vkou 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
daemonologist 14 hours ago [-]
I think they're saying that you should build a small business which nets you 85k, not find an employer that underpays you.
(Whether this makes you more resistant to being "fired" is still up for debate of course.)
jambalaya8 14 hours ago [-]
Small businesses have difficulties all the time.
OhSoHumble 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah.
"The market" lays you off - or heavily reduces your salary.
UncleOxidant 11 hours ago [-]
> you will never get laid off.
Please explain this assertion.
dzonga 3 hours ago [-]
85K via independent means. not salary.
once you get to 85K whether via consulting, your own apps etc - you don't get laid off in case I wasn't clear.
my apologies for not being clear enough.
hattmall 10 hours ago [-]
If you work in industry, at a place that pays developers $85K, you are very unlikely to be part of some sort of downsizing. This is entrenched company territory and the kind of place that just goes about it's business, not trying to hang the moon or "ramp up" areas. Yeah they can be subject to wider economic influences, but at tech companies layoffs happen just because of a change in the wind while profits are breaking records.
Like there's a place near me, I don't even think they would pay $85K though. Maybe for higher positions, but closer to $70k. They are pretty much always hiring lots of IT positions. They make firetrucks and pretty much only sell them regionally, but are set with orders for like 25+ years. Their low skill positions fill up fast though.
15 hours ago [-]
cuttothechase 12 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is that this is not a linear relationship.
It is not like ah.. there is my 85K job or 150K job and now I will never get fired or laid off.,
Late stage capitalism will find its way to make it more efficient at 85K level or at 1.5M level. Pick your red/blue pill.
qurren 16 hours ago [-]
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
Sidio 8 hours ago [-]
Your second point is so bizarre. You're complaining hardworking immigrants make you look bad because you don't work as hard?
make3 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, exactly this. Migrant workers, under the threat of being deported if they don't work enough, obviously can be forced to accept much worse work conditions and work-life balance.
froh 3 hours ago [-]
yes! this enslavement mode is exactly the idea of those driving current policies.
iririririr 6 hours ago [-]
that's a very weird way to read it.
i hope your kids are not sewing shoes instead of getting an education.
jen20 14 hours ago [-]
US citizen and permanent resident are equivalent for the purposes of this...
shoo 13 hours ago [-]
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.
iboisvert 12 hours ago [-]
FIRECalc https://firecalc.com/ is another planner with more knobs. It has models for decreasing spending with age.
hirvi74 11 hours ago [-]
One thing I have wondered about these calculations: is one's annual income supposed to be inclusive of all remunerations? You know, things like employer matches in retirement accounts, health insurance contributions, etc.?
shoo 11 hours ago [-]
> things like employer matches in retirement accounts
seems completely reasonable to model this as income.
> health insurance contributions
If your employer provides a health insurance benefit that would otherwise cost you $X / yr, you could model that as +$X / yr income and +$X / yr expenses.
Simple FIRE calculators like that Networthify one assume that your expenses in retirement are the same as when you are working, but that's probably not true for many people, for numerous reasons: health insurance once you're not longer working, paying off a mortgage, children launching into the workforce, increasing health expenses as you age, lifestyle changes when you're not working, potentially moving to a different area with a different cost of living.
But as a 0-th order approximation, assuming expenses in retirement are the same as when you are working is a place to start when assembling a rough plan.
pantelisk 17 hours ago [-]
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
_sys49152 16 hours ago [-]
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...
oalae5niMiel7qu 16 hours ago [-]
...and then you just get fired one day.
xmprt 17 hours ago [-]
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...
georgeecollins 16 hours ago [-]
Really? I did great just alternating between "grind" and "lay low". Retired with $4.8m at 25!
preommr 15 hours ago [-]
This seemed to work best.
Unexpected given what I know second-hand about the valley - which is to grind leetcode and keep job hopping.
Exoristos 15 hours ago [-]
One of the rarely discussed life skills is going against the flow.
jambalaya8 14 hours ago [-]
This works only until other people also feel that is the thing to do.
hx8 1 hours ago [-]
Many strategies have an early adopter advantage.
apsurd 14 hours ago [-]
it cannot be discussed or else it becomes the flow.
korrectional 14 hours ago [-]
doesnt that mean your resume will be full of short jobs and you wont get hired anymore
otherme123 8 hours ago [-]
I tested just "side project", "YC" and "launch", touching grass when burnout is over 80%, ignoring anything work related, trice:
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 25 · walked away with $6.40M · peak burnout 82%
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 26 · walked away with $11.37M · peak burnout 91%
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 26 · walked away with $8.96M · peak burnout 95%
Trying to balance grind, touch grass and side project took me 20 years before retiring with 20'ish millions after selling a hard-worked side project.
It seems that if you ignore work and do "side project" only from first month, your networth increases with the compensation when you are fired, and if you last one year (almost all runs), you can keep "side project" indefinitely.
ryandrake 15 hours ago [-]
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.
make3 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, I really don't think that such a high fraction of people get purchased for fucking 15M after one year lol
JimsonYang 16 hours ago [-]
Well thats your problem, everyone knows you got to apply to YC to get funded
/s
abeyk 16 hours ago [-]
this is possible now with AI
jeremyjh 15 hours ago [-]
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.
apsurd 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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?
OhSoHumble 14 hours ago [-]
Something that I was hoping was that LLMs would make software development easy enough so that I could upskill in areas that determine entrepreneurial success. But I find that the quality of code from LLMs is low enough that I have to spend a lot of time doing QA (or manual coding).
But also you could write the god damn best software out there but if you can't convince people to open the web page or download the app then it goes nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
Steppphennn 13 hours ago [-]
Because code was never the bottleneck.
daredoes 17 hours ago [-]
I won by just grinding and touching grass
Muromec 13 hours ago [-]
That's not cheating, that's the answer
B-Con 10 hours ago [-]
Same.
And since I won with an age, company, and title that is literally me right now... Well, I'm not exactly sure what to do with it information but some internalization is in order.
ButlerianJihad 15 hours ago [-]
I’ve had dates like that
abeyk 16 hours ago [-]
sad reality of life
vinceguidry 16 hours ago [-]
Sounds like someone who has never touched grass. ;-p
esafak 16 hours ago [-]
He's just got a case of the Mondays.
hamburgererror 2 hours ago [-]
Do you feel like it is accurate? Sounds like life is about getting rich or die, no in between.
What about doing something meaningful like, how they say, fix grandma's printer...
rgmerk 15 hours ago [-]
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?
sscaryterry 17 hours ago [-]
RAT RACE #1 · DECEASED*
*dead at 25 · $164k unspent · the on-call rotation already updated
adityaathalye 9 hours ago [-]
Form HR-1099-RAT · Exit Interview · economic status: locked in
Permanent Underclass
angrydev 12 hours ago [-]
“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?
Michelangelo11 4 hours ago [-]
In the 80s, something like this was a bona fide video game you could buy in stores:
Very good too, actually, assuming you enjoy the premise of CYOA in the corporate world. You can play it online for free if you want to give it a whirl.
jerrycat101 6 hours ago [-]
RAT RACE #2 · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 49 · walked away with $3.88M · peak burnout 88%
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...
Onavo 16 hours ago [-]
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.
DhawalModi 16 hours ago [-]
I try to resist the urge to vibecode, but yes agree on sales
oalae5niMiel7qu 15 hours ago [-]
The hard part is even knowing what someone would pay for. I don't know if a sales guy knows that or not.
Exoristos 15 hours ago [-]
Sales at this level is a negotiation. And, either way, it's common to start your price in the neighborhood of the competition's price.
flipper_ft 2 hours ago [-]
Grinding followed by immediately touching grass (and never taking promotion) seems to be a good strategy.
hx8 1 hours ago [-]
I think IRL has more implications to not taking promotions than is coded into the game. I wouldn't use this game as career advice.
henry2023 14 hours ago [-]
It'd be cool to have a mode where you input your current base / age / networth and simulate forward.
gh0stmach1ne 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Calazon 14 hours ago [-]
Automatic lifestyle creep with promotions? Well, it's definitely not a FIRE simulator.
jebarker 14 hours ago [-]
Are you suggesting that everyone with FIRE aspirations avoids lifestyle creep?
__turbobrew__ 9 hours ago [-]
I still drive a 2007 honda fit shitbox with a TC of 500k. It is possible.
jebarker 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t doubt it’s possible, but suggesting that the game isn’t simulating FIRE because it includes lifestyle inflation seems wrong.
frgturpwd 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know, the higher my TC gets the easier I find it to reduce my spending. I feel like it inflates in the beginning and then it kinda levels out.
jebarker 6 minutes ago [-]
I know many, many people that have continued to increase their expenses as their income grows but would also like to FIRE in theory. There’s a whole movement called FatFIRE that is basically full of these people
Calazon 14 hours ago [-]
Not everyone, no, but some people do choose to avoid lifestyle creep, or at least have a lot less of it than their peers. I'm just saying it's optional and not inevitable.
10 hours ago [-]
Coneylake 6 hours ago [-]
I maybe have encountered a bug? Got a popup asking if I want to take severance but I was already laid off (for a few turns before the popup).
RAT RACE #2 · ESCAPED
out in 15y 3q with $1.47M · peak burnout 94%
Not from the US, how accurate is this? It feels frightening :(
3 hours ago [-]
chknkachunga 15 hours ago [-]
I wish I could laugh at this. It hits a little too close
DoctorDabadedoo 17 hours ago [-]
Nice! Had a burnout, a kidney stone and was laid off before even hitting 25! Sounds about right.
_ink_ 5 hours ago [-]
Escaped after 16 years with peak burn out 92%.
In reality I am 11 years in, nowhere near escape and maybe at 80% burnout.
omoikane 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Scene_Cast2 15 hours ago [-]
The FIRE net worth seems unrealistically low.
daemonologist 14 hours ago [-]
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.
cucumber3732842 14 hours ago [-]
Not if you're selling your house in "muh good school district" to the next sucker and retiring to <shuffles cards> Idaho.
duskdozer 5 hours ago [-]
But then you have to live in Idaho.
NooneAtAll3 15 hours ago [-]
my screen too short vertically - I didn't realize there's a whole half of the game hidden from me
ayaanh03 17 hours ago [-]
9.6 mil acquisition cash out we are so back
13 hours ago [-]
motbus3 4 hours ago [-]
5M and 0 stress almost
No job either.
xboxnolifes 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Exoristos 16 hours ago [-]
Just use Chrome like a normal person.
bearjaws 16 hours ago [-]
"How come Google keeps making Chrome shittier :^(" - People who say this
16 hours ago [-]
Exoristos 15 hours ago [-]
That was sarcasm. On the other hand, it is certainly a normal experience to have to use Chrome for reasons like this.
_sys49152 16 hours ago [-]
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
FlowSt 17 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 15 hours ago [-]
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.
quaddoggy 13 hours ago [-]
This re-triggered my FAANG burnout. Thanks.
aslihana 6 hours ago [-]
It is TOO real. Shocked me
morelandjs 16 hours ago [-]
Man, I hate that tech has just become money. Content like this perpetuates it.
vinceguidry 16 hours ago [-]
... it always has been?
It's youthful exuberance that can pretend it was ever anything else.
fragmede 15 hours ago [-]
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.
frgturpwd 4 hours ago [-]
If things were so good then, how did they lead to Now?
Muromec 3 hours ago [-]
The other people, it's always the other people
hassanhjk 16 hours ago [-]
I love how mind said “the offer says it’s the beginning of a journey but it’s actually a wheel”
14 hours ago [-]
Grosvenor 16 hours ago [-]
Heavy drug wars vibe. I love it.
rnd0 15 hours ago [-]
I originally wasn't going to try it -but now I have to!
himata4113 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Exoristos 15 hours ago [-]
> Poverty, but extremely high tolerance for burnout.
Slanting toward the fantasy genre here.
chief_kegwin 10 hours ago [-]
love this. I can feel your cynicism with every decision I make. haha
mrspacejam 10 hours ago [-]
Too real. 99/100
thomasjackson29 15 hours ago [-]
I couldn’t step away from the grind :D very funny game and ngl I want my own Milton in real life
maybiiLen 14 hours ago [-]
add a dating life status bar
StefanBatory 7 hours ago [-]
RAT RACE #2 · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 31 · walked away with $10.78M · peak burnout 95%
only did grinding and side project. got acquired. if it were that simple..
cpt_sobel 5 hours ago [-]
Bro please center-align the "not affiliated" line at the bottom :)
yieldcrv 17 hours ago [-]
RAT RACE #1 · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 28 · walked away with $10.17M · peak burnout 100%
xyzelement 14 hours ago [-]
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
omicronxt 16 hours ago [-]
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED
sold the company at 30 · walked away with $14.98M · peak burnout 94%
did i win???
davidw 10 hours ago [-]
Oh no, I died of dysentery.
ChrisArchitect 11 hours ago [-]
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)
reinitctxoffset 14 hours ago [-]
It's accurate because the discretionary equity grant isn't visible in any of the obvious performance metrics.
But you know.
abeyk 18 hours ago [-]
too realistic
oalae5niMiel7qu 15 hours ago [-]
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.
paxys 17 hours ago [-]
My vesting cliff somehow hit after getting fired lol
LPisGood 17 hours ago [-]
I have a friend who got laid off and had that happen.
binarymax 15 hours ago [-]
I escaped! Just grind until you hit 80% burnout then touch grass to bring it back down. Rinse repeat.
chajath 10 hours ago [-]
Hitting to close to home lol. Amazing simulator game!
cucumber3732842 15 hours ago [-]
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.
goodpoint 17 hours ago [-]
Now make it 10x more difficult for those not born in the US.
calculatte 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe you haven't seen the state of things in the US lately...
goodpoint 4 hours ago [-]
Look at salaries for the other 95% of human population on levels.fyi - earning $100k at 25 years is incredible privilege.
advaith334 15 hours ago [-]
beautiful
bfung 14 hours ago [-]
Anyone see how Opus did? lol
Also, eerily accurate timeline!
jongjong 16 hours ago [-]
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.
elzbardico 16 hours ago [-]
Or maybe it is just sarcasm.
jongjong 16 hours ago [-]
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.
windward 14 hours ago [-]
Your life would be more cushy if you didn't hang around in suboptimal jobs.
fHr 14 hours ago [-]
banger
elzbardico 16 hours ago [-]
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.
steadybuilder 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
MPSimmons 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
ge96 16 hours ago [-]
No option for the rat to bite you, you get rabiz, sue and cash out?
nico 16 hours ago [-]
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
Synthetic7346 15 hours ago [-]
Depends in which part of California
nico 13 hours ago [-]
If you retire at 30 with $1.7M, you’d be getting about $45-$60k/year for the rest of your life
Maybe if you live by yourself, or have someone contributing a second income, and inflation doesn’t catch up with you
Exoristos 15 hours ago [-]
Goes pretty far in Weed, for example.
Rendered at 14:05:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
once you get to 85K whether via consulting, your own apps etc - you don't get laid off in case I wasn't clear.
Dreaming of something does not make it real.
Even in Germany, where going to university is very cheap, people have such dreams of social ascent by getting a degree. Here is a German article about how this does not always go well:
> https://www.blaetter.de/ausgabe/2016/august/exzellente-entqu...
> https://archiv.telepolis.de/features/Exzellente-Entqualifizi...
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.
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'.
As for the last part of your reply, I am guessing it was meant to get reactionary replies (touché).
That’s my experience. The more I have made in my career, the better and with more respect I got treated. As freelance I did some projects with non profit “do gooders”. They didn’t pay well and treated people horribly. On the other hand, successful companies will treat you well and pay well.
I mean, it paid well in the early-mid 2010s also and was way less toxic.
It certainly had its share of toxic traits, but it was at the "what place doesn't?" level.
However, money is not everything to me. While the salary is not truly impressive, my job has a lot of benefits. People sleep on these jobs while chasing MegaCorp clout which is cool and all, but I am just a redneck clever enough to write bad code. I don't want FAANG, and FAANG doesn't want me.
> Unless you have a family, want to travel
We have generous PTO, sick leave, bereavement leave, 6 weeks of paternity leave for mothers AND fathers, 16 holidays off, etc.. Plus, many offices are 100% remote (mine is 3/5 days a week).
> want an ample retirement fund
I have a Pension, 401k, and a 457(b) all through my employer. I am fortunate that the pension is also fully funded for over 30 years in advance. Plus, PTO rolls into sick time annual and sick time can be used to purchase service time, thus one can retire even faster than the typical 30 year timeframe.
> have complex health issues
We have great health insurance plans, and my office has been wonderful in dealing with people with very complex health issues. Way more than what I expect the private industry would do.
Guess how many people have been laid off from my office? ;)
Sure, if one was FAANG caliber, then a few mill would be left on the table periodically. However, when is enough ever enough? I seriously feel like I do not need millions to be happy in life.
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.
That hit pretty hard...
This is far from true. There are plenty of expensive places to live away from the coasts
Our family lived in HCOL places like Boston and LA before returning to Cincinnati a few years ago. It’s still cheaper than those but wow… I remember it being a lot cheaper when I left. Since we returned it’s gone up even more. Some neighborhoods went up by as much as 25% in the last 5 years and are not coming down.
I’ve been convinced for years that the inflation numbers are cooked. Or at least “massaged.” I don’t understand how people with only near median salaries live. It’s amazing there aren’t riots.
PNW dweller here, ^^^ this feels _insane_. average private school tuition for a single child is above $25k, nevermind kids pural! :O
In 2000, very possible
In 2010, probable
In 2026, unlikely
From the creators of how to draw the owl, lol!
Even New York City has a median household income of ~80K. Half of all households in NYC survive on that.
I think too many people just have poor spending habits (or children).
People making 85K absolutely get laid off.
(Whether this makes you more resistant to being "fired" is still up for debate of course.)
"The market" lays you off - or heavily reduces your salary.
Please explain this assertion.
once you get to 85K whether via consulting, your own apps etc - you don't get laid off in case I wasn't clear.
my apologies for not being clear enough.
Like there's a place near me, I don't even think they would pay $85K though. Maybe for higher positions, but closer to $70k. They are pretty much always hiring lots of IT positions. They make firetrucks and pretty much only sell them regionally, but are set with orders for like 25+ years. Their low skill positions fill up fast though.
It is not like ah.. there is my 85K job or 150K job and now I will never get fired or laid off.,
Late stage capitalism will find its way to make it more efficient at 85K level or at 1.5M level. Pick your red/blue pill.
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
i hope your kids are not sewing shoes instead of getting an education.
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.
seems completely reasonable to model this as income.
> health insurance contributions
If your employer provides a health insurance benefit that would otherwise cost you $X / yr, you could model that as +$X / yr income and +$X / yr expenses.
Simple FIRE calculators like that Networthify one assume that your expenses in retirement are the same as when you are working, but that's probably not true for many people, for numerous reasons: health insurance once you're not longer working, paying off a mortgage, children launching into the workforce, increasing health expenses as you age, lifestyle changes when you're not working, potentially moving to a different area with a different cost of living.
But as a 0-th order approximation, assuming expenses in retirement are the same as when you are working is a place to start when assembling a rough plan.
Unexpected given what I know second-hand about the valley - which is to grind leetcode and keep job hopping.
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 25 · walked away with $6.40M · peak burnout 82%
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 26 · walked away with $11.37M · peak burnout 91%
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 26 · walked away with $8.96M · peak burnout 95%
Trying to balance grind, touch grass and side project took me 20 years before retiring with 20'ish millions after selling a hard-worked side project.
It seems that if you ignore work and do "side project" only from first month, your networth increases with the compensation when you are fired, and if you last one year (almost all runs), you can keep "side project" indefinitely.
/s
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.
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.
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?
But also you could write the god damn best software out there but if you can't convince people to open the web page or download the app then it goes nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
And since I won with an age, company, and title that is literally me right now... Well, I'm not exactly sure what to do with it information but some internalization is in order.
What about doing something meaningful like, how they say, fix grandma's printer...
Anyone else in the club?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Suite_(video_game)
Very good too, actually, assuming you enjoy the premise of CYOA in the corporate world. You can play it online for free if you want to give it a whirl.
https://www.abeyk.com/escape-the-rat-race/
Gotta go grind out some AI B2B Agentic project now...
RAT RACE #2 · ESCAPED out in 15y 3q with $1.47M · peak burnout 94%
https://www.abeyk.com/escape-the-rat-race/
In reality I am 11 years in, nowhere near escape and maybe at 80% burnout.
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.
That was fun. Side-projected spam, touched grass once, YC, Side-project one more time, launch, acquired.
Same strategy, seems to be the winning one.
It's youthful exuberance that can pretend it was ever anything else.
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.
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.
Slanting toward the fantasy genre here.
https://www.abeyk.com/escape-the-rat-race/
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
did i win???
But you know.
Sounds about right for someone who was born in the late 70s and got in in the 90s.
Also, eerily accurate timeline!
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.
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.
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.
Maybe if you live by yourself, or have someone contributing a second income, and inflation doesn’t catch up with you