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What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

blog.janestreet.com

61–70 of 219 posts

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#61
post #17
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I worked on Wall Street even the IT guys and the doorman had their personal accounts invested at the firm which was a significant perk given that the firm was closed to new customers.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or have some other successful characteristic that you do not. 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…

It's helpful for your mental health to not take anecdotal "salary reports" on HN seriously. Whenever salary comes up, everyone here knows someone whose brother's roommate pinky-swear definitely makes $400K at Facebook, therefore this must be "normal salary" there. I've worked for a number of companies talked about here and have never even made close to the "HN Quoted Average Salary." Voluntary online salary boasts fr…

That's kind of you to say, but I do personally know lots of people at Facebook, Google, Lyft, Citadel, Stripe etc that _do_ make this much or more. Meanwhile, even the L6's at my company make around $300k - that's about what E4's make at Google. Plus, levels.fyi is generally pretty accurate.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#64
post #46
post #4

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.

How does a normal software developer go about getting in? Do they give the traditional google interview or worse?

I don't know about "worse", but unless things have changed in the past few years, yes, I'd say it's a "traditional" interview ("code up a rough solution to this algorithmic problem on a whiteboard/laptop"), and yes, I'd say it's harder - they're widely considered to be some of the hardest interviews in the industry, and personal anecdote for confirmation: about five years ago I interviewed at Jane Street and Google on subsequent days. The Jane Street interview was one of the most exhausting batteries of my life; by comparison the Google one was a cakewalk.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#65
post #58
post #4

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.

I think Jane Street is single-handedly keeping OCaml a production-level language (which is a good thing, because it's a great mix of functional programming with a practical/pragmatic approach). If you haven't tried OCaml (or F# which is based on it), I highly recommend it.

How do you think it would go learning "backwards" from Elixir (which I'm currently learning w/ Phoenix for another purpose)? I've glimpsed through Reason/Bucklescript but never spent real time in them.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#66
post #4

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.

I don't know about anyone else but I have a negative perception of tech companies in the financial sector. Perhaps my perception is wrong, so I'm curious, how does the culture compare to one at Google or Facebook?

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#67
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you "depressed" that you are on the 99th percentile of world income? You make more in 2 years than my grandfather made all his life, in over 50 years of hard hard work. Or alternatively, you also make about as much in a month as I do in a year, at a very competitive PhD program.

World income is irrelevant since I live in a nice part of America, not the world. And yeah, I do make about as much as your and my grandfather made over the course of their careers. Unfortunately, if I'm making an apples-to-apples comparison with people doing equivalent work (perhaps not at Jane Street, but definitely at Google or Facebook) I'm making about 80% or less. That means I'm worth 80% in the eyes of the fai…

Your wage on the labor market is not your value as a human. Maybe it's time you leave your nice part of America and live among people who won't make you feel like you're part of a rat race but value you for who you are.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#68
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or have some other successful characteristic that you do not. 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…

You are making 3x the median family income for this country while getting to work from home and stay safe from COVID-19. The job market is imploding around us while we work cushy tech jobs. Abject misery abounds as people lose their loved ones and their livelihoods. It comes off as as quite tone-deaf when tech people complain about their $150k salaries. There are way too many entitled people in tech who have never wo…

People should not be complaining then about their $25k salaries, either. Because there are way too many people on this planet who do not have even that. (And, oh, by the way, one could be sent off to war only to die there after plenty of suffering.)

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's helpful for your mental health to not take anecdotal "salary reports" on HN seriously. Whenever salary comes up, everyone here knows someone whose brother's roommate pinky-swear definitely makes $400K at Facebook, therefore this must be "normal salary" there. I've worked for a number of companies talked about here and have never even made close to the "HN Quoted Average Salary." Voluntary online salary boasts fr…

That's kind of you to say, but I do personally know lots of people at Facebook, Google, Lyft, Citadel, Stripe etc that _do_ make this much or more. Meanwhile, even the L6's at my company make around $300k - that's about what E4's make at Google. Plus, levels.fyi is generally pretty accurate.

How do you know? Have you seen their W2 forms? A lot of people are also full of shit, especially when it comes to things like compensation. How do you know "levels.fyi" is accurate? AFAIK they base their information on self-reported anecdotes too. How do they correct for bias?

The only organizations I would trust to give accurate salary averages are payroll companies, who can properly do a uniform sample, and I don't think they publish their data for free.

Personally knowing someone that makes $X does not necessarily mean that $X is an average or normal compensation.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#70
I know a guy who works at Jane Street; he was formerly one of the brightest undergrads at Caltech. He turned down an offer to do a PhD at Berkeley to take the Jane Street offer, IIRC. He is pretty idealistic and has an interesting philosophy about working in finance: he thinks moving money around isn't that societally valuable, but he donates 10-15% of his income to charity each year (I think he picks charities using the GiveWell/effective altruism methodology). In his view, the value of his lifetime charitable contributions exceeds the impact he could hope to have in pretty much any other field of endeavor, so the job is completely worth it.
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