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Yes.
What do the math or CS PhDs do at Jane Street? I don't know much about trading so I am curious.
The first half of the book goes over the academic history of quant trading.
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This comment really did not help my depression as someone that makes $150k two years into a FAANG job. I've never even been able to get interviews from HRT or Jane Street, and my Citadel offer was less than $200k...
Comparison is the thief of joy. You are more than your work, and I would say you'll always be unhappy if you define your identity or your success by how much money you earn. Someone around you will always earn more than you, or have some other successful characteristic that you do not. That being said: while it's not perfectly meritocratic, I would say tech and (this side of) finance is uniquely attainable for someon…
That's both fair and true, but I'm someone without any successful characteristics.
> You don't need to have gone to a particular school.
All of the interns in question went to top schools of course :)
> If you already got into one of FAANG, you almost certainly have a strong baseline skillset already
While I wish that were true, unfortunately, the FAANG is Amazon so I don't think that's much proof of anything. I would work towards achieving mastery of what I would need to do to pass an interview, but I can't even get an interview - again, because of my current company and undergrad.
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I guess I might have some misconceptions of OCaml. Are there other companies that use it? I ask because whenever someone says "OCaml is used in industry, for example, Jane Street", they say it like it's just one example, but it's always Jane Street.
The OCaml website lists some companies it [0], I think there are a bunch of new blockchain startups that are also using OCaml but are not on that page. [0] https://ocaml.org/learn/companies.html
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"Routinely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I can confirm it's possible, as I've been in the industry and have spoken to people who make seven figures at Jane Street. But I would rather say it's "reasonably attainable" for an engineer who has been there for at least five - seven years and is really hitting their stride with the type of work. They do routinely beat out top tech compensation, and most engineers there…
> Either you're good enough to maintain at least that level of comp, and you stay, or you're out within a year or two. Tech companies have explicit up-or-out policies for lower-level engineers. I don't think the top trading firms do any more firing of new grads than FANG does.
It's somewhat different in finance, because firms like Jane Street don't have "levels", as it were. There are individual contributors and managers, but to the extent you get a promotion, it's only increasing your scope of work for more money. They don't have well established ladders like FAANG.
But you might be right that the involuntary attrition is equivalent on a percentile basis; that I honestly don't know off the top of my head.
For those who don't know, Jane Street is one of the best performing algorithmic trading firms on Wall Street. Probably the largest Ocaml shop on earth. It's a lucrative job for strong programming talent. Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year (edit: after a few years). They are similar to Two Sigma in tech focus and talent, which is a more well-known firm.
For those who don't know, Jane Street is one of the best performing algorithmic trading firms on Wall Street. Probably the largest Ocaml shop on earth. It's a lucrative job for strong programming talent. Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year (edit: after a few years). They are similar to Two Sigma in tech focus and talent, which is a more well-known firm.
Do they give the traditional google interview or worse?
For those who don't know, Jane Street is one of the best performing algorithmic trading firms on Wall Street. Probably the largest Ocaml shop on earth. It's a lucrative job for strong programming talent. Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year (edit: after a few years). They are similar to Two Sigma in tech focus and talent, which is a more well-known firm.
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It's rarely the case that Technology sees those kinds of bonuses; that's most common on the Investment side. And yes, even places like Jane Street separate between Investement and Tech.
The investment side is engineering. If you're talking about IT that makes the printer work, sure.
There are engineers working in Investment, yes, but the risk profiles, the payout profiles and the focus of their work is very different. Investment deals with getting and analysing data, understanding the market and their algos, coming up with trading ideas, handling their PB relationships, doing the actual trading (e.g. portfolio optim, factor hedging, worrying about financing and borrow costs) etc. Technology deals with all things infra and (in most places) ingesting data and making it easily available internally.
In particular, I would be surprised if the interns in this article were on the Investment side - a fund would rarley publish anything remotely resembling research. In fact:
"Yulan ended up working with both the trading desk that was running this process, as well as the research group, which pointed her at some cleaner cost functions to optimize, as well as encouraging her to try out simulated annealing in addition to the greedy algorithm she started with."
The "research group" and the "trading desk" are Investment.
Does Jane Street and similar firms hire Math or CS PhDs with backgrounds in theory?
The one small firm that everyone in the industry has heard of is basically all phd guys screwing around with theory and execution and getting filthy rich in the process.
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Yep, and they use OCaml! I always feel like I have to point it out since people do not think much of it, have lots of misconceptions of it, and so on.
It need to be pointed out because there may be like grand total of dozen companies which uses OCaml so it is something remarkable. It is like paintings from famous painters in billionaire's homes. Now for me and may be for lot of people stuff from Bed Bath and Beyond is just fine on our walls. So for ultra-rich / successful/profitable company might see beauty in Ocaml but most of the world runs fine on run of the mil…
most of the world doesn't run fine. If airplanes were built like your average software stack they'd drop out of the sky every other day.
Development practise at a place like JaneStreet is an example how things ought to be done. I really dislike the analogy of Ocaml as some sort of esoteric billionaire tool. It's just a sound language that everyone can understand, it's not even particularly academic despite its reputation. This is just what software engineering looks like if you actually treat it like... well engineering.