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.
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?
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
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 for sandboxed agents to manage cloud infrastructure in controlled ways - building the builder who never builds. I see a lot of that on Twitter too.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
People making 85K absolutely get laid off.
This is far from true. There are plenty of expensive places to live away from the coasts
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
Unexpected given what I know second-hand about the valley - which is to grind leetcode and keep job hopping.
/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 for sandboxed agents to manage cloud infrastructure in controlled ways - building the builder who never builds. I see a lot of that on Twitter too.
Gotta go grind out some AI B2B Agentic project now...
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.
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.
Sounds about right for someone who was born in the late 70s and got in in the 90s.
did i win???
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.
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 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.