FAANG Simulator
abeyk.com404 points by nerdbiscuits 13 hours ago
404 points by nerdbiscuits 13 hours ago
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.
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".
How much was/is your rent per month? And how many dependents?
low end rent is now normalized across de nation. there's no escape from the race.
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).
“ 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.
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.
Perhaps you just didn't push it far enough: I took a 90% pay cut and am happy with it :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unless you have a family, want to travel, want an ample retirement fund, have complex health issues, etc etc.
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
If you have complex health issues then I think you're much less likely to be able to tolerate a FAANG type job.
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.
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.
try doing premium themes or plugins on bigger platforms, than gravitate to your core item
> 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.
How long ago was this? In the last 5 years rent has increased dramatically in many of the historically LCOL cities.
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.
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.
How many kids did you have when making $85k in Denver?
Just as important is when.
In 2000, very possible
In 2010, probable
In 2026, unlikely
> 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!
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.)
1 is not an option for a lot of us in geographically tied roles that are infrequently fully remote
> you will never get laid off.
Please explain this assertion.
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.
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.
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
Your second point is so bizarre. You're complaining hardworking immigrants make you look bad because you don't work as hard?
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.
that's a very weird way to read it.
i hope your kids are not sewing shoes instead of getting an education.
Not from the US, how accurate is this? It feels frightening :(
Escaped after 16 years with peak burn out 92%.
In reality I am 11 years in, nowhere near escape and maybe at 80% burnout.
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.
FIRECalc https://firecalc.com/ is another planner with more knobs. It has models for decreasing spending with age.
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.?
> 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.
RAT RACE #2 · ACQUIRED sold the company at 49 · walked away with $3.88M · peak burnout 88%
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...
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...
Yes, I really don't think that such a high fraction of people get purchased for fucking 15M after one year lol
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.
doesnt that mean your resume will be full of short jobs and you wont get hired anymore
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.
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.
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 won by just grinding and touching grass
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.
sad reality of life
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%
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?
RAT RACE #1 · DECEASED* *dead at 25 · $164k unspent · the on-call rotation already updated
Form HR-1099-RAT · Exit Interview · economic status: locked in Permanent Underclass
“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?
Bro please center-align the "not affiliated" line at the bottom :)
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...
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.
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.
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.
Automatic lifestyle creep with promotions? Well, it's definitely not a FIRE simulator.
Are you suggesting that everyone with FIRE aspirations avoids lifestyle creep?
I still drive a 2007 honda fit shitbox with a TC of 500k. It is possible.
I don’t doubt it’s possible, but suggesting that the game isn’t simulating FIRE because it includes lifestyle inflation seems wrong.
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.
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.
It is TOO real. Shocked me
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.
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.
my screen too short vertically - I didn't realize there's a whole half of the game hidden from me
9.6 mil acquisition cash out we are so back
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.
This re-triggered my FAANG burnout. Thanks.
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
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.
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.
I love how mind said “the offer says it’s the beginning of a journey but it’s actually a wheel”
Heavy drug wars vibe. I love it.
RAT RACE #2 · ACQUIRED sold the company at 31 · walked away with $10.78M · peak burnout 95%
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.
Too real. 99/100
I couldn’t step away from the grind :D very funny game and ngl I want my own Milton in real life
add a dating life status bar
Oh no, I died of dysentery.
love this. I can feel your cynicism with every decision I make. haha
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
only did grinding and side project. got acquired. if it were that simple..
RAT RACE #1 · ACQUIRED sold the company at 28 · walked away with $10.17M · peak burnout 100%
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)
RAT RACE · ACQUIRED sold the company at 30 · walked away with $14.98M · peak burnout 94%
did i win???
It's accurate because the discretionary equity grant isn't visible in any of the obvious performance metrics.
But you know.
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.
too realistic
Hitting to close to home lol. Amazing simulator game!
My vesting cliff somehow hit after getting fired lol
I escaped! Just grind until you hit 80% burnout then touch grass to bring it back down. Rinse repeat.
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
Now make it 10x more difficult for those not born in the US.
Anyone see how Opus did? lol
Also, eerily accurate timeline!
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.
banger
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.
[dead]
[dead]
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
Depends in which part of California
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