Escape the Rat Race: A Realistic FAANG Life Simulator Experience
FAANG Simulator
I built a life simulator to show the hidden costs of chasing a FAANG career. You can experience the high salaries, intense pressure, and eventual burnout firsthand. This tool reveals how the dream of working at top tech giants often traps you in a cycle of endless work, making it hard to ever truly escape the rat race.
The dream of landing a job at a FAANG company often turns into a gilded cage where you trade your freedom for a paycheck that never feels like enough.
- dzonga
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.
- qurren
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
- pantelisk
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
- shoo
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.
- xmprt
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...
- daredoes
I won by just grinding and touching grass
- rgmerk
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
RAT RACE #1 · DECEASED*
*dead at 25 · $164k unspent · the on-call rotation already updated