CEO Simulator: Startup Edition | Hacker News Reader

CEO Simulator: Startup Edition

ceosimulator.vercel.app

242 pointsatorok72 comments

It’s hard to believe you used to be able to get a normal job at a local company in your hometown and afford a house, car and children working 40 hours a week.

> Q: Is working overtime mandatory if I don't have enough hours?

> A: No, overtime is optional and comes with risks to CEO Mental Health.

Like the game, it's still luck. You can luck out and get a 20 hr/week job writing simple code from home and coast.

It’s fully dependent on your hometown’s COL. my home town is a moderately sized, but mostly forgettable city in the eastern time zone. This is absolutely possible there if you’re in probably 80% of the suburbs, but you may struggle to be in the very nice few towns.

They say taxes were higher at the top end, might be worth a shot

Instead multimillionaire property owners in California pay no property tax because they're old and people who just bought a house with young kids pay all the tax. Most regressive tax system ever devised, designed to keep us underpopulated and our government services underfunded

That’s not the purpose. The purpose is for people to age in place. Not have to move out of state at 75 because taxes on your home skyrocketed. Which is what happened and the population voted in a proposition to stop it. Yes, it had unintended consequences like all government things.

Wouldn't it make more sense for people to downsize to smaller homes as they age? Instead we have incentivized empty nesters to stay in huge homes with 5 bedrooms while young families have to cram into 1 bedroom condos.

That’s why they changed the law to allow for this.

If we wanted to keep old people in homes we could've written a tailored program for old people.

As it stands, Prop 13 was sold as that, but also essentially used a sledgehammer on a thumbtack, because it applies to any property regardless of the age of the property owner, and also to commercial and industrial property. Not to mention, old people who want to downsize (say, into a home without stairs to fall down) can't afford to because of the massive jump in property taxes that would entail.

That’s not true. The law was altered so people can downsize if they are very certain age.

As for commercial… it’s more complex but it’s interesting.

Often, anything that is not a starter office or retail, the renter pays the taxes. This is usually called triple net but lots of time it’s true even when not NNN.

So you raise the costs on the renter.

Take a 60yr old retail center owned by the same family and the rents are likely lower than market due to the buildings age (not necessarily true everywhere).

Positives:

lower costs across the board. Some businesses that just don’t seem like they can make enough do just fine.

No forced gentrification. If you raise taxes above rents, well no use having that building even exist. Tearing it down would be cheaper than open and charging rent. Or tear down and rebuild. Often with national tenants. No mom and pop in new construction last few decades.

Apartments rent on old building will go up… unless rent controlled. In which case, maybe no longer be a landlord. Remove those units.

Negatives:

long term owners benefit vs short term flippers.

General feeling of unfairness. I find this stronger in residential than commercial though.

Some commercial should be torn down. Very much an opinion though. Some call stuff blight and others character.

ADA and lots of stuff is grandfathered in so lots of stuff with character is not ADA compliant. There are reasons why stuff built today all looks the same and somewhat soulless.

BTW: new buildings, etc, get imitate hike to todays taxes even if the land does not.

Prop 13 hasn’t really solved the housing crisis.

The way to reduce it is to build enough to relieve demand, at which point there would be less pressure forcing valuations sky high.

Intentions of policies don't matter. Outcomes do

They matter when people are specifically discussing them, which is the case here.

Sorry, I had to reread the grandparent and you are out course correct

> Not have to move out of state at 75 because taxes on your home skyrocketed

Taxes don't go up 600% year over year. And if Prop 13 didn't disincentivize new construction, taxes wouldn't skyrocket in the first place.

The effect is the purpose. Everything else is marketing.

A city 15 minutes outside one of the richest cities in the entire world is closing down schools. Know why? The old people who live there and their landed gentry children who inherit their title (I mean ability to legally contribute no tax) from their elders don't pay any property tax, so the schools have no money, and anyone who moves in has to foot the entire bill. Only people who can do that put their kids in private schools. And on and on.

So, so many of the QoL issues people suffer in California are because of this prop, and people defend it with this senior folks exemption. I'm sorry. If you become a multimillionaire sitting on your bum, the government should not offload your tax burden onto other people's because you're old. It's too destructive to society to do that.

Have you spent much time in non-urban areas? I live in a <10k town and it's very much possible to achieve that here. I mean, not working at McDonald's, but our industry zone has plenty of good-paying opportunities in the mechanical, electrical, engineering, and even aerospace fields (drones, mostly). I have plenty of blue-collar friends working in these areas, and they all have homes with families.

We also have a huge green energy sector due to the natural geography. Our local community college even has a full program you can go through and come out making $35-40/hr.

My rural American hometown has surprisingly expensive homes because of highly restrictive building codes, many of the houses are owned by retired people or wealthy people from out of town, there's little industry to speak of, and multiple people from my 30-student 8th grade graduating class who stayed in town and did not leave for college have now died of heroin overdoses.

Yeah, there will always be counter-examples to everything, especially given the size of the U.S. However, that same sort of town would have existed 60 years ago, anyway (minus the Herion problem, likely). Perhaps they are more common now, but my point is that cities like mine _do_ still exist. It's not entirely lost yet.

How common is your un-named city? <10k pop, combination of economic opportunity and still affordable (after wfh tech crowd moved in) for someone starting out earning $40/hr to afford a house and family.

Well this is the internet, so I'm not going to voluntarily dox myself :) As to your question, I'm not sure how common it is. There's another city about 30 minutes from me that has _almost_ the same scenario, it's just housing is more expensive because it's closer to a major city.

That sounds magical. Is it subject to just one or two large companies or industries?

Don't bank on it unless you're well skilled and/or have an in. Also let's hope you're OK working in factory/industrial jobs. A desk job in rural areas pays half what they do in the urban areas.

I'm guessing industrial jobs pay just as poorly compared to those in the cities.

I live somewhere like that. Houses have doubled in cost over the past 5 years.

Houses have doubled in cost everywhere in the US over the past 5 years, rich and poor areas alike.

Yep, that was my point.

Seems like an anomaly. Most <10k towns have jobs at Walmart, auto repair, landscaping, construction, electricians, plumbers and barbers/hairdressers.

I moved from Memphis, TN to Silicon Valley and it took me 10 years of working in software to be in the market for a home. Meanwhile my friends who worked odd jobs in sandwich shops or theatres or filming / taking photographs for magazines all had homes a few years after we graduated.

It's a failure of the government that they allowed the old, senile landed gentry in parts of our country, especially California, to effectively be able to veto all new building while paying no property tax to fund our public services.

Is it the old people? It feels like it's the new, young people moving to the city that do this.

When people do investigative reporting on the SF housing market, they find a bunch of people who have been spent 8 years trying to convert dilapidated buildings into an apartment complex, but have been getting blocked by environmental reports on what shadows the building will cast, or other bureaucratic nonsense.

This is a famous video demonstrating that point; where even if you're rightfully zoned to do something, it can take years and years of fighting bureaucratic nonsense if you haven't bribed the right people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExgxwKnH8y4

Yes it's the old people and their descendants who inherit titles from their ancestors allowing them to bypass tax payment and shovel more tax burden on productive members of society. Only in the city which has built much of the modern internet did we need to reinvent literal feudalism.

If you don't believe me. Just find some seniors in the bay and ask them. They are majority opposed to "changing" the area and taking away its "character" without realizing that the character is something they do not pay to maintain at all, and instead almost all young people (except the landed gentry) have to fund and don't agree to fund anymore.

I'm doing this right now, north of Pittsburgh. It's still possible

I was just back in my hometown of New Castle (~1 hr north) for TG, and it's the same story there.

Though most professional people need to drive to Pittsburgh or similar big city to get a decent job.

This is what most homeowners do.

But isn’t it still the same? You just need to be reasonable what a „normal job” is.

It’s hard to read cards on mobile.

If I tap a card to read the full text, the card then covers other cards. If I tap on another card, it now covers the rest. And if I tap the original card to remember a detail from the description, this now plays the card.

Edit: Looks like clicking anywhere else “deselects” the active cards - this way it is possible to read the description of all cards at any time without playing any.

You can tap off of cards to shrink them back.

But then you choose it. I misselected several times

Weird, I had no problems deselecting cards by just tapping off to the side. Usually bottom right.

On mobile screens the cards that were previously selected take a lot of space in the background; if you click that background card, intending to “deselect” the foreground card, then you suddenly play the background card. But yes, if you click anywhere else then all cards are deselected. Still, I find this very unintuitive.

I changed the behavior now: tap and hold magnifies it and short tap select the card. At least with my fingers now I was able to avoid the mentioned side effects

Yeah, the part where clicking a non-selected card can play it is very unintuitive.

I was just remarking on the deselecting part, since I didn't have much trouble with it. Might vary per specific resolution/aspect ration.

I modified the behaviour so that tap and hold will straighten the card and magnify it. When you release it just goes back to the original position. Short tap plays the card.

Tech Debt score of +5 at the end. Is it obvious I'm a software engineer?

bug notes

- couple of times a card seemed to get magically selected for me, i've got "tapping = clicking" disabled on my trackpad, so not sure how those happened, hopefully was me fat fingering. usually i didn't even have time to see the new card though, which makes me think it might be some bug with noticing inputs? could be my fat fingers tho.

- When I have spare meeting time left over, I was able to select an objective that had moved as a result of a card at the start of the day, could infinitely roll the dice with nothing happening. I could at least select a different objective to make things move forward tho.

Thanks, lol, you deserve a well-architected wink ;)

Thanks for these bug reports, nice and detailed so I'll be able to find a fix for them

> I was able to select an objective that had moved as a result of a card at the start of the day, could infinitely roll the dice with nothing happening.

Same bug here, in Firefox 128.

Also, while we're making suggestions, would it be possible to replace the tutorial balloon boxes with something that's less in the way? I like built-in hints and don't want to turn them off, but sometimes they can be a bit annoying when they cover up parts of the game UI. I would prefer some kind of animated glow behind the parts of the game I'm supposed to click on (cards, bars, or the die) plus a statically positioned explanation box to the side or on the bottom. That would make the hints unobtrusive enough that there would be no need to provide an option to turn them off.

Can you refresh the browser and see if it's fixed? I also made the hints slightly transparent as a quick temp fix, that needs a bit more time and testing

Looks fixed to me, thanks! Now the die doesn't roll when I select an objective that has moved. That works, though I would prefer if these objectives were simply unselectable and the game had some kind of visual indication of which objectives you can select. Kind of like desktop GUIs, which grey out buttons you can't click rather than letting you click them but making them do nothing. I think that would make the game UI a bit "smoother" and more pleasant to use.

EDIT: This would combine very well with my suggestion from the previous comment: make the cards glow in the card selection stage, make the selectable objectives glow in the objective selection stage, and make the die glow when it should be rolled. That would let you get rid of two microfrustrations at once: the hints that cover the UI and the die that can be clicked but doesn't roll. If you also replaced the modal tutorial popup at the start with a top or side button, that would drop the UI microfrustrations to zero.

Also, I've just noticed that the cards are a bit blurry when zoomed in on hover.

I hope the feedback was helpful!

Love this. However, when I got a high score I appeared twice on the leader board for some reason. Another time I appeared just as “name” and my high score which would have put me at #1 at that point (12090!) didn’t get entered at all.

I also got duplicate cards a few times - which might be intentional, but was a little annoying.

Very addictive in a silly fun way. Well done :)

Lova your last comment :D

I fixed the first issue: I got also an alert at the same time that I ran out of quota on the db so had to increase it. You should see your point now. The duplicate cards issue is strange.. I'll have to debug that a bit more

SAM, I can see your score, I just dethroned you with 12280.

MONSTER! I will vanquish you when I have time from my actual job which startlingly resemble this.

I also got a score that would have put me on the leaderboard, but the leaderboard did not update sadly.

Did you check the console to see if there were any error messages?

I played a card that said tech debt drops by 4 thinking it’s a good thing, but it knocked me out of the game

You thought too much, that makes investors uneasy.

ROFL this comment made my day

Why are the cards overlapping? There is enough space on my mobile screen to display them all if they were not tilt

If you set the amount of working hours per day to 14, the game suddenly becomes easy. :')

I didn't understand how people were scoring so high until I saw in the Settings that you can increase the Working Hours to 24, and your Hand size to 10.

The game immediately became less fun. I was able to max everything out in green in just a few days.

"Note, modifying these settings means your score will not be added to the leaderboard!"

Brilliant. This is my life.

Ah this is a quote I was looking for :D

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

Some CEOs are clearly winning. Global thermonuclear war has not broken out yet either :)

Great game. I love it so much.

fun game, but annoying to read the cards on mobile. would be nice to have an option to have them laid out without being fanned and overlapping

Related, if you like startup simulators, then you'll love The Founder (http://thefounder.biz/).

Incidentally Francis Tseng also worked on Half-Earth Socialism, which is also quite fun, and both games happen to be open-source (https://github.com/frnsys/)

Lol, thanks I'm trying them out!

I can’t watch the tutorial because YouTube insists on a sign-in. -_-

Same here. Opening the tutorial video directly [1] in a different browser and with clear cookies worked for me.

I rarely see this login wall, usually it happens in combination with hn posts.

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dSpE4wgQGnY

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