alt Hacker NewsTo make a programming game true to life, it could have a prestige mechanic where you keep all your code/scripts, but the api introduces breaking changes and you have to rewrite.
“Good job! Halfway through the workday on Thursday, some big brain engineer in a distant department has decided to change the order of for loop clauses in the interpreter, so now it’s “for variable declarations; variable modifications; conditional checks {}”. They adamantly refuse to revert the change because “it makes more sense to group variable stuff together”. Prod is down now. Have fun!
Documentation should often be wrong.
There should be five options for each piece of tooling, none of which quite work the same way, all of which have a fan-base singing their praises, and three of which have critical problems you probably won't find out about until you try them. Then the one you pick gets abandoned when you're part way done. (this feature only for the Javascript and Python DLC)
Example farms should use old versions of libraries that are no longer maintained.
Interfacing with other farms should require manually faking a downgrade of some protocol you're using, because the older one is no longer available for you and they can't/won't upgrade.
You should be forced to design certain parts of the system in ways that are harder to use and constantly break when changing other parts, just so the appearance of those parts is "on brand". This should require re-writing functionality that would otherwise be supplied "for free" by a library.
When you're finally getting things how you want them, your farm should get cancelled and the whole thing abruptly burned to the ground because your parent company just decided to buy a different, existing farm instead.