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What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#111

Post by tossingcomp »

polote wrote: post #8
davidu wrote: 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.

> Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year. Do you have a source for such claim ? data from h1b salary [1] tells that senior software make 200k base, and here [2] they explain that the average salary is 440k [1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=JANE%20STREET&job= [2] https://news.efinancialcareers.com/fr-en/307393/jane-street-...

Anecdata, but I totally believe this. FWIW, I get inbound recruiting from FAANG as well as some prestige finance companies. I'm a generalist with no degree but ~8 years of experience. I make ~$300k/year in NY. Given grapevine comp chatter, I'm sure that pre-Covid I was leaving money on the table versus what I'd earn if I prepped and left for FB or Google. I'm super happy with my employment situation though, so I've just been enjoying life.

Partially to leave the door open and partially just to see how folks reacted, rather than giving a blanket "no thanks" to recruiters I got into the habit of replying to fancy recruiters with "I absolutely love my job and am not looking to leave. , I wouldn't consider leaving for less than $600k/year unless a new role offered ." It may seem silly, but with luck, good timing and not using current comp as an anchor I've doubled up previously. My philosophy is that it never hurts to ask for more than you think you deserve, especially if you don't act like you're entitled to it.

This was mostly met with "glad it's going so well there" and I can only assume snorts of derision. Meanwhile, the dude from fancy "headhunting" firm comes back with: "Excellent! With your profile, I can get you at least $700k with one of my buy-side client firms."

Feel free to decide for yourself how much weight to give the anecdote. Maybe that # has a real basis for someone with (at the time) 5-6 years of experience. Maybe he assumed I must be making something near it already. Maybe he was saying anything to get his foot in the door. Or, maybe he decided I was jerking his chain and decided to have some fun of his own. He certainly made an impression.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#112

Post by pb7 »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #95
tcoff91 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is also the case for people at Google, etc but they still manage to find time to complain about not being able to expense their lunches [0] Overall I don't disagree, but the path to JS or equivalent companies seems to be astonishingly narrow given the fact that I did…

>they still manage to find time to complain about not being able to expense their lunches

No one but perhaps the most incapable of taking simple care of themselves is complaining about it. Teams are allocated yearly budgets to do team-oriented events and other things. That money is now going unused. One of the suggestions was to donate it, which is also prohibited, but I guess that's not as catchy of a headline.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#113

Post by zerr »

davidu wrote: 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.

Engineers or quants? For the latter it is a common case in most trading shops.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#114

Post by losvedir »

jeffbee wrote: post #57
davidu wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people who work there. That comp data excludes bonuses -- and most importantly -- that employees are able to invest in the proprietary funds themselves, which generate insane returns.

Another thing the HN orthodoxy rejects is that professional investing and trading can make money above monkey-dart levels, despite the abundance of evidence that it does.

What evidence? I thought that was standard orthodoxy, not just on HN. No one doubts that people can and have beat basic index funds; I just thought that was a poor predictor of what would beat the market again going forward (perhaps after accounting for fees?).

I used to work in sell side equity research before leaving to do software development, because at least from my vantage point, no one was that great at predicting the market.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#115

Post by Smaug123 »

909832 wrote: post #24

Does Jane Street and similar firms hire Math or CS PhDs with backgrounds in theory?

I'm not at Jane Street, but at G-Research (also quant finance). Much as a joke goes which I first heard in the Effective Altruism sphere, our quants come from all kinds of backgrounds: their PhDs are in fluid mechanics, statistical physics, pure maths, you name it!

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#116

Post by pb7 »

tcoff91 wrote: post #60
lowiqengineer wrote: post #42

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…

>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 worked a shit minimum wage job in their lives.

Seems quite tone-deaf to compare yourself to the worst off. It's easy to pat yourself on the back for not having to sleep in the dirt but that's not a very high bar, is it? Some people want to have purpose and to keep growing and becoming better and more successful -- it's not tone-deaf to want that. And you don't have to absorb the misery of everything that's happening around you or you won't have time to do anything else.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#117

Post by sokoloff »

jolux wrote: post #71

I completed the interview process at Jane Street last year and received a verbal offer after my on-site which they then proceeded to rescind while we were discussing pay ranges, claiming they had decided instead to fill the position I applied for with internal staff. Their recruiter handled it with a high degree of professionalism but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless.

> received a verbal offer after my on-site which they then proceeded to rescind while we were discussing pay ranges

I would think that compensation would be a required element of an employment offer. (I wouldn't say that I'd received a job offer if it didn't also include compensation information. If I didn't agree to the proposed figures and decided to negotiate, then I'd received a job offer that I declined.)

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#118

Post by munchbunny »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #96
jolux wrote: post #71

I completed the interview process at Jane Street last year and received a verbal offer after my on-site which they then proceeded to rescind while we were discussing pay ranges, claiming they had decided instead to fill the position I applied for with internal staff. Their recruiter handled it with a high degree of professionalism but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless.

Sorry to hear about your experience. I have to ask: Who gave you the verbal offer? Was it an internal recruiter, external recruiter, or the company's HR department? I mentor a lot of college students. They're always very nervous about the possibility of rescinded offers despite how rare it is in practice, so I'm curious about the details of your situation. When mentoring people, I always advise people to never assume…

This is great advice. I usually go a step further: the offer isn't a done deal until it's signed by both parties and any background checks have passed. Until then, you're still interviewing and considering other offers.

It also puts pressure on the company because it means you might still disappear on them, so they better take care of their paperwork.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#119

Post by Smaug123 »

giantg2 wrote: post #97

Wow. These interns at that comapany are working of stuff that's way more interesting and complex than the crap I deal with at my financial company. From what others are saying, it looks like they pay way better too.

Honestly quant finance has a lot of really interesting problems in. That XKCD about "why would I want to be paid lots to work on fascinating problems with the brightest people in the world" is… actually kind of true.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2020 edition

#120

Post by decafninja »

TylerE wrote: post #9
polote wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year. Do you have a source for such claim ? data from h1b salary [1] tells that senior software make 200k base, and here [2] they explain that the average salary is 440k [1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=JANE%20STREET&job= [2] https://news.efinancialcareers.com/fr-en/307393/jane-street-...

Wall Street jobs are very very performance bonus driven. Not unusual for bonuses to be 5x or more salary in a good year.

"Wall Street" is such a broad term.

Places like Jane Street and their like obviously pay technology employees very well. But they represent an absolutely tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the pie.

The vast majority of SWEs employed in Wall Street work for various firms big and small that you'd be fairly lucky to break 200k-250k TC decades into your career. No, 200k isn't a small income, but odds are you could match that number at any number of middle tier tech companies, earlier in your career, while enjoying a much better work environment and various other perks.

And of course upper-middle to top tier tech companies (culminating in FAANG) can offer multiples of that amount - and again, probably with much better working environments and other perks. Your odds of making it into FAANG or similar caliber tech company are probably much higher than your odds of making it into a Jane Street caliber financial firm.

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