careers.games — a free career simulator game: be anything you want, one milestone at a time Tech adventure ⭐ Level 1 ▶ Play 🌟 Your big adventure starts here Today you get to be a Coder — and do great things! …one small step at a time 🚀 ⭐ 27 steps  ·  9 places to work  ·  1 big adventure

Reputation is three numbers

• 🛠️ Craft How good you actually are. Grows from doing the work. Big Tech screens on this.
• 🧭 Leadership Grows from scope, hiring and seniority. Gates every senior title — no leadership, no VP, no matter how famous you are.
• 🌐 Network Grows from moving, talks, exits and people. Drives warm intros, negotiation odds and founder mode.

The big number is a weighted blend, tilted toward craft for builder disciplines and toward leadership for go-to-market ones. It grows fastest when you're slightly out of your depth — a company above your level, in a role with real responsibility.

• Being the best person in a weak room plateaus you. Growth halves once you're well above your company.
• Age curve. Fastest before 29, solid to 38, slowing to 44, declining after 48.
• Seniority never drops. Titles ratchet up even when the numbers fade.

Pace & energy ⚡

• 🔥 Sprint +30% growth, burns energy fast.
• ⚖️ Steady The sustainable default.
• 🌴 Coast Growth drops by a third, energy comes back.

Below 60 energy you grow more slowly; below 35 it really bites, and burnout stretches get likely. Changing jobs gives you a small boost. Sprinting for a whole career is a losing strategy — sprint into a promotion window, then coast to recover.

The offer call 📞

Accepting opens a call where you can push on salary (+18% cash), equity (×1.6 on any future exit) or title (a full rung, immediately — the hardest ask). Or sign as offered and take zero risk.

• Your odds come from network, the market cycle and your current standing.
• Fail and they hold firm — and about 7% of the time they pull the offer entirely.
• Equity is the sleeper: it does nothing until an acquisition, then it does everything.

Your network 🤝

Hire and mentor enough people and they start appearing in your profile. Years later they resurface as VPs, CTOs and founders — and then:

• Warm intros — a green InMail from someone who already vouched for you: better seat, better pay.
• Co-founder calls — a founder friend pulls you into a company with double the runway and a bigger starting valuation.
• Every move you make widens the network on its own.

The interview loop 🎲

Offers marked 3-round interview put you through a screening call, a technical or strategy round, and a final round — each a visible dice roll against a different blend of your tracks.

• You see your number, their bar and your exact odds before rolling.
• One strike is survivable. Two and they pass on you — costing energy and the offer for that cycle.
• A warm intro adds 10 points of odds and buys you one free re-roll.
• The final round leans on leadership and network, so a pure craft career can stall at the last hurdle.

Streaks & deadlines 🔥

• On a roll — every milestone that moves reputation by 2+ builds a streak, up to +30% growth and money. Layoffs, burnout and flat milestones reset it to zero.
• Expiring offers — some InMails carry a live countdown. Let the timer run out and the company moves on, right there in front of you.

Dilemmas ⚖️

Layoff lists, stolen credit, a growth hack that lies a little, a security hole nobody knows about, an early acquisition offer. Two or three options, no obviously right answer, and the choice is written into your CV either way.

Most trade one track against another — leadership for network, cash for reputation, energy for output. Some end your job on the spot.

Daily challenge 🎲

The date seeds everything: your discipline, your city, the companies, the luck. Everyone in the world gets the identical start, you get one attempt, and the result is a spoiler-free score you can copy and share. New seed at midnight.

Your seat at the table

• 🚀 Started it Founding team — most growth, most equity, most risk.
• 💚 Important Core team — the healthy default: you matter and you're safe.
• 🌱 Still learning Supporting role — you joined above your level; growth is slower until you catch up.
• ⚠️ In trouble On a PIP — you're the first name on the layoff list. Move.

Your seat is set by the gap between your reputation and the company's strength — and it can change with a reorg.

Disclaimer & privacy

• Fiction. Not affiliated with or endorsed by any company named here. Trademarks belong to their owners.
• Random. Every offer, layoff, salary and exit is generated by the simulation — none of it describes any real employer.
• Private. No accounts and no ads. Your career is saved in your own browser and never leaves it. Google Analytics counts anonymous visits — nothing you type is ever sent anywhere.
• Not advice. It's a game, not career or financial guidance.

About the company names

Big Tech and scaleup employers use real company names so the ladder feels like the one you actually climb. Everything that happens at them is randomly generated — a layoff here says nothing about that employer in reality. Early-stage companies are fictional, because at pre-seed nobody has heard of anyone anyway.

Companies & ecosystems

• Garage stage — pre-seed, weak, cheap, occasionally lottery tickets.
• Funded startup — Series A/B, where most careers live.
• Scaleup — Series C+, real money, real politics.
• Big Tech — public, the highest bar and the highest pay.

Ecosystems change the ceiling: the Bay Area, New York and London have the strongest companies; Lisbon and São Paulo are gentler. Every company you work at is saved to your collection forever.

Founder mode 🌱

A dashed violet card appears at decision points. Take it and the rules change: your title becomes Founder, your salary drops to about half of market, and you get a runway clock.

• Every milestone burns runway. Under 8 months it turns red.
• Raising a round refills runway and multiplies your valuation.
• Hit zero and the company dies — you're back on the job market.
• Survive to Scaleup or Big Tech and an acquisition pays 10–30% of valuation.

Roughly a third of startups fail. The upside is far bigger than any salary.

Your manager 👤

Every job comes with a named manager, a style (coach, politician, absent, ex-founder) and a relationship bar. Sprinting and streaks build it, being on a plan destroys it, and reorgs replace them entirely — roughly one job in seven.

• Above 78 — faster growth, promotions argued for you, half the layoff risk.
• Below 26 — slower growth, promotions blocked, and a real chance of ending up on a plan.

Your stack 🧰

You carry a named technology or method. It ages every milestone: at 4 years it starts reading as dated, at 5.5 it slows your growth and Big Tech quietly filters you out of their pipeline. Re-skilling costs energy and a chunk of a milestone, but resets the clock and bumps craft.

Where you work 🏠

• Remote protects energy but grows your network far more slowly.
• Relocating costs money, resets part of your local network, and moves you into a stronger ecosystem permanently.
• Visas — offers in another country need sponsorship. Plenty of companies won't, and those cards can't be accepted.

Going independent 🧑‍💻

From reputation 56 and network 54 you can start consulting. Several clients, income that swings ±60%, no equity, no manager, no layoffs — and your network compounds faster than in any job.

The world without you 🌍

• Hot sectors — AI, fintech, climate, crypto and others heat up and cool on their own timers, changing pay and exit odds wherever you work.
• Company fates — places IPO, get acquired or die while you're elsewhere. The startup you turned down becoming a unicorn is a real feed line, and every fate is recorded in your collection.
• Tech Daily — periodic headlines about your era, occasionally naming you once you're well known enough.

Changing career 🔄

A card at every decision point offers to start again in another field. You keep your network and most of your leadership, lose about 58% of your craft, drop four rungs and lose your credentials — and your calling jumps 26 points. The recap tells your life as acts: "Act 1: Law until 41, finishing as Senior Associate. Act 2: Hospitality & Food."

Credentials, calling, and money 🎓

• Credentials — board exams, bar admission, CFA, QTS, trade tickets, chartership. Certain rungs stay locked until you sit and pass the exam, which costs energy and can fail.
• 💚 Calling — how much you actually want to do this. Driven by role-style fit, your manager, your pace and whether you own the place. High calling protects energy; low calling drains it however well you're paid.
• Money is field-honest — medicine starts poor and ends high, kitchens stay low unless you own the room, finance front-loads, teaching flattens. Pay ratchets: it climbs with tenure and never falls just because you got older.
• 🌙 Side work — locum shifts, tutoring, catering, freelance briefs. Cash now, energy later.

Honors and hazards per field 🏅

Michelin stars and a place on the national top 50 in kitchens. Silk, case of the year and pro bono awards in law. Landmark papers and clinical excellence in medicine. Teaching fellowships and Outstanding in education. Design and safety awards on site. Gold records and journalism prizes in media.

And the other side: regulator complaints, courtroom collapses, burns, falls, weather, strikes, inspections, probes and legal threats — each field breaks in its own way.

Life outside work 👶

A partner offered the job of their life abroad. A child. A parent who needs care. Each is a real fork — go, stay, commute, pay for help, go part-time, move closer — and each writes itself into your CV either way.

Eight fields 🌍

💻 Technology · 🩺 Medicine · ⚖️ Law · 💰 Finance · 🍳 Hospitality & Food · 🎬 Media & Arts · 📚 Education · 🏗️ Trades & Construction.

• Each field has its own six rooms on the floor plan, its own ladder (Commis Chef → Chef-Patron, Paralegal → Managing Partner, Medical Student → Chief of Surgery) and its own milestones.
• Employers change with it: real institutions at the top — Mayo Clinic, Skadden, Nomura, Frantzén, the BBC, Balfour Beatty — and invented local ones lower down.
• Tiers are renamed per field. A community clinic is not a garage startup; a magic circle firm is not Big Tech.
• Founding means what it should: open a practice, a restaurant, a studio, a contracting firm.

Toys 🎛️

• 🎨 Career poster — the recap generates artwork unique to your run: one ring per job, arc length by tenure, colour by sector, gold dots for honors. Shares to your phone's native share sheet.
• 📱 Tilt view — on the desk-picking screen, tilt your phone and the office moves with you. On a desktop, the plan follows your cursor.
• ⏪ Replay — drag through your own career on the recap and watch reputation, salary and titles change milestone by milestone.
• 🎶 Live score — an ambient soundtrack generated on the fly by Web Audio: sparse and minor in a funding winter, brighter in a boom, faster as your streak builds. No audio files at all.
• 💬 Recruiter chat — the offer call opens as a message thread, typing indicator and all.
• 🔗 Share my world — copies a link that recreates your exact seed, city, discipline, difficulty and ambition, so someone else can run the same world and compare.

Late career 🪑

Fewer conventional offers arrive, but board seats and angel cheques start appearing at decision points. Board seats pay a stipend and grow your network; angel investments take years to resolve and mostly go to zero — except when they don't.

Market cycles

• 📈 Bull market More offers, better pay, more exits.
• 〰️ Steady market Business as usual.
• 📉 Funding winter Double the layoffs, thinner inbox, lower pay, fewer exits.

Cycles last two to five milestones. Moving during a winter is harder — sometimes the smart play is to sit still.

Honors, achievements, endings

• Honors — earned inside one career: exits, IPOs, patents, 30 Under 30, Operator of the Year.
• Achievements — twelve cross-career challenges, from Global Nomad to Never Working Again.
• Endings — ten named finishes decided by how your career actually ended: Bought the Island, Unicorn Founder, The Legend, Burned Out, The Lifer, The Quiet Life. Collect them all.
• Collection — every company you've ever worked at, across every run.