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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
On the end screen, it shows "Shareholder value created" with some huge number.
I find this terrifying because it suggests 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 conspiracy theory narratives "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. 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 everyone uses it has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with attention monopolization.
Working for a bootstrapped startup; that's real value creation because there is enormous risk involved and no engineer wants to take that risk.
Working for FAANG is more like being appointed to the king's court. There's no value creation happening... And the line to be chosen 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.
It's like if someone made a joke about genocide. That's how certain topics make me feel. My brain refuses to process.
That said, I do think a lot of cynical engineers have a "Rat race" worldview and not the "Hamster wheel" one.
Also, the amount of money which is needed to retire in the game is huge! 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...
Why do you assume I have access to such opportunities? This whole argument rests on the idea that everyone has equal access to opportunities. Which is incorrect.
Firstly, it's trivial to prove that the hiring process is broken and discriminatory. Secondly, history is not an indication of future performance. Just because it's been working out for big tech over the past few decades, doesn't mean this will continue. Especially when you look at the socio-political environment today, the risk profile is incredibly high... For a vanishing return.
For me to become a millionaire through big tech, starting from today, the previous batch of tech bros would become billionaires... Hundreds of thousands billionaires? That's just not realistic.
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.
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
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.
I don't care how I "look". If a company puts me on PIP because I worked hard for 40 hours instead of 80, so be it, I'll just take severance, leave, and relax for a while. I have the luxury of doing that, and I'll prioritize my health and family over a rat race. I do believe in working hard, but I also believe in family and having pursuits to live life for outside of work.
If you're in H1B at a FAANG, you unfortunately don't have that luxury, because if you don't work 80 you may be put into PIP and forced to uproot your entire family and destroy your kids' education if you can't nail another job within 60 days. And so in groups with both H1Bs and citizens/PRs, a lot of H1Bs will work harder, out of fear, not because they actually want to, and if there is a stank ranking system, the ones who don't fear will be the ones who get PIP more easily because they respect their bodies' limits.
I was just suggesting that the game can simulate both of these modes, the second being drastically harder.
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
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?
Due to multipolar traps (large-scale, multi-agent versions of the Prisoner's Dilemma) i.e. when individuals in a competitive system are forced to take actions that benefit them in the short term, but degrade the system for everyone over time.
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.
205 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadAnd 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.
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.
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.
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.
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%
Trying to balance grind, touch grass and side project took me 20 years before retiring with 20'ish millions.
did i win???
I find this terrifying because it suggests 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 conspiracy theory narratives "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. 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 everyone uses it has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with attention monopolization.
Working for a bootstrapped startup; that's real value creation because there is enormous risk involved and no engineer wants to take that risk.
Working for FAANG is more like being appointed to the king's court. There's no value creation happening... And the line to be chosen is long. Being chosen is not based on skill or talent. Talent is abundant. It's a kind of lottery.
It's like if someone made a joke about genocide. That's how certain topics make me feel. My brain refuses to process.
That said, I do think a lot of cynical engineers have a "Rat race" worldview and not the "Hamster wheel" one.
Also, the amount of money which is needed to retire in the game is huge! 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...
Firstly, it's trivial to prove that the hiring process is broken and discriminatory. Secondly, history is not an indication of future performance. Just because it's been working out for big tech over the past few decades, doesn't mean this will continue. Especially when you look at the socio-political environment today, the risk profile is incredibly high... For a vanishing return.
For me to become a millionaire through big tech, starting from today, the previous batch of tech bros would become billionaires... Hundreds of thousands billionaires? That's just not realistic.
Gotta go grind out some AI B2B Agentic project now...
i hope your kids are not sewing shoes instead of getting an education.
If you're in H1B at a FAANG, you unfortunately don't have that luxury, because if you don't work 80 you may be put into PIP and forced to uproot your entire family and destroy your kids' education if you can't nail another job within 60 days. And so in groups with both H1Bs and citizens/PRs, a lot of H1Bs will work harder, out of fear, not because they actually want to, and if there is a stank ranking system, the ones who don't fear will be the ones who get PIP more easily because they respect their bodies' limits.
I was just suggesting that the game can simulate both of these modes, the second being drastically harder.
Maybe if you live by yourself, or have someone contributing a second income, and inflation doesn’t catch up with you
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.