Show HN: Corporate Mind Games – logic puzzles with a sarcastic corporate theme

30 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by dontwordle

12 Comments

FatherOfCurses

2 hours ago

One of these games involves assembling the perfect office layout for a RTO. A friend of mine works for a major corporation that recently enacted a 100% RTO mandate.

I used to work there too, and knowing what I know about their operations, I am willing to bet that probably 75% of the workforce in their offices are going to spend 100% of official work time on Zoom calls. They own offices all across the company and operate on the principal that every corporate office gets a piece of every corporate operation, so almost every team has only one or two members in the same physical location.

RTO's are almost always soft layoffs nowadays, so it will be interesting to see if the RTO achieves the desired effect or if they still have to reduce headcount in the future. Right now all they're doing is introducing their water, power, and auxilliary staffing costs without any corresponding increase in productivity.

cbarrick

2 hours ago

I know I'm in the minority, but WFO works great for me.

My office is in walking distance of my home. I get great office perks (lunch, coffee, quality meeting rooms, good desk and workspace). And having a second space for work that is not my home is great for my mental health and WLB.

All of my meetings are still video conferences. Doesn't move the needle for me.

I choose to be in office 5 days a week even though only 2 are required, and it's been great for my productivity.

WFO in a shitty office is still a shitty experience, but an actually good office space is a productivity boost IME.

0cf8612b2e1e

13 minutes ago

Who still has good offices? Seems like the world is steaming full speed towards miserable shared hotelling desk situations.

cube00

2 hours ago

> almost every team has only one or two members in the same physical location.

I was in a similar situation. I wouldn't mind coming in because in person discussions have their their benefit but I resented being made to come in just to sit on Teams calls all day. It was open plan (of course) and everyone else in the giant space with hard surfaces were also on team calls. Even my line manager was in a different physical location.

jadengeller

2 hours ago

this is higher quality than i expected given the very ai design

might be worth trying to tweak to look less like the default ai theme

cute overall tho!

dontwordle

an hour ago

That's good feedback. Are you referring to the home page specifically?

I spent most of my time on the puzzle mechanics and just getting the difficulty right.

simonbw

an hour ago

The puzzle pages also give pretty strong AI vibes to me. I think it just reminds me what I've gotten from Claude when I let it decide on design.

Some of the specifics that come to mind:

- the use of emojis instead of icons

- the text content largely sounds like it's written by Claude. This is a big one and it's everywhere: the names of the games, the descriptions, the status texts, basically every single piece of text that I've read.

- the fact that text is being used for some things at all feels a bit Claude-y, like the "Today's result: pending" status or "Vibes are perfected. Well done."

- a lot of the color scheme feels AI somehow. It's interesting, because it's not like the colors are wrong or anything, they somehow just feel like "default" LLM colors

- same thing with the typography

dontwordle

an hour ago

Yeah it's definitely a mix of AI and me haha. The names, color schemes, and status texts are good callouts. The emojis I actually introduced to start to have a theme across games, though I didn't put them in the org chart game. A lot of the copy was written by AI, and then I didn't like the output and changed it.

I appreciate the feedback that it felt off. That's what matters in the end. Thanks for the taking the time to share this.

rootsudo

2 hours ago

Traumatic, the sprint board. Why.

rf15

2 hours ago

yes it's perfect, I'm having flashbacks

mpalmer

an hour ago

Love the zoom presentation; the tone of voice is spot-on, if chipmunk-ified!

dontwordle

an hour ago

Haha glad you enjoyed. I individually recorded each one (obviously played at varying speeds)