too realistic

I won by just grinding and touching grass

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

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

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

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.

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

9.6 mil acquisition cash out we are so back

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.

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

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

My vesting cliff somehow hit after getting fired lol

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...

No option for the rat to bite you, you get rabiz, sue and cash out?

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

did i win???

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.

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.

I love how mind said “the offer says it’s the beginning of a journey but it’s actually a wheel”

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...

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

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

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.

Man, I hate that tech has just become money. Content like this perpetuates it.

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.