FAANG Simulator turns the Big Tech rat race into a one-tap doom-clicker

“The Rat Race” is a satirical browser game that compresses an entire Big Tech career into a doom-clicker. Each tap advances one financial quarter of your life: you start at 22 on a $190k package and try to grow a “quit-forever fund” — the game’s measure of freedom — while juggling stats like performance, burnout, and net worth before the industry grinds you down. A shared daily-run mode hands every player the same “cursed timeline,” so people can compare who escaped and who flamed out first.

The whole thing is played for laughs at Silicon Valley’s expense, leaning heavily on Office Space references — the mascot is Milton, the exit paperwork is a “Form HR-1099-RAT” — plus a wink-wink disclaimer that it’s “not affiliated with any trillion-dollar company, allegedly.”

Beneath the joke sits a compact critique of tech work culture: the treadmill of quarterly reviews, accumulating comp, and rising burnout, all spent trying to buy your way out of the job. It’s the kind of viral web toy that lands on Hacker News precisely because its audience is living the premise.