What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
blog.janestreet.com
What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
1–10 of 96 posts
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#2Great article, one I wait for yearly.
Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#3Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
Comparison is the thief of joy. Be better than who you were yesterday. Exceptional talent is also rare, don’t feel bad if you’re not exceptional. Billions will lead happy, fulfilling lives having not been.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#4I always love these posts. Great job to the interns. Building a tokenizer with a handcrafted automaton instead of a regex sounds like a cool project. And I found it interesting that Jane Street has a frontend for interacting with different AI services and LLMs. I'm curious how that's used.
But to be honest, what surprised me most about that was that Jane Street cares about counting the token usage in its API calls. I can see why they would care if they were interacting with AI models at very large scales, but are they? They have billions of dollars, so it struck me as odd to see such concern for efficiency in what must be a very small cost center.
I wonder if the motivation is more about providing feedback to the users of the frontend tool, as they write their prompts, so they can gain an intuition for what makes an efficiently tokenized prompt? (So that when the day comes that they are running these prompts at scale, the token sizes really matter). Or maybe I'm imagining "prompts" wrong, and these are not just a few paragraphs of text, but actually 20,000+ tokens at a time, including data like e.g. pasted CSVs of trading history for the LLM to analyze?
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#5Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
> Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street?
Would you not rather be whoever founded Jane Street and gets the largest profit share? Why aspire to be an expensive perfect instrument in someone else's hands?
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#6Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
Inferiority is how you frame it. You don't need to be Jane Street level to do good things in computer science or life. I've found a job where I do cool things on a compiler and I like it. I don't feel inferior to them, instead I feel inspired from these articles to learn cool stuff and build things I'm proud off.
I can say though that when I was working on stuff I enjoyed less (backend ERP stuff), I felt much worse and would compare myself to others a lot more. So I think these feelings you are expressing can sometimes be a manifestation of not being very satisfied with your own life.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#7Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
> Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street?
Just don’t compare yourself with people that work at trading firms.
Instead, compare yourself with people that work in tech/FANG
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#8Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
90% (made up number) of tech jobs are just making CRUD apps anyway.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#9Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
The people that attempt and fail their interviews settle for FAANG and are probably pretty happy. Most software engineers I've met don't even know about Jane Street.
Also, definitely not "in basically every way," but very specifically logical/mathematical intelligence.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#10I always love these posts. Great job to the interns. Building a tokenizer with a handcrafted automaton instead of a regex sounds like a cool project. And I found it interesting that Jane Street has a frontend for interacting with different AI services and LLMs. I'm curious how that's used. But to be honest, what surprised me most about that was that Jane Street cares about counting the token usage in its API calls. I…
Token counting is importing when you are injecting fetched data into the prompt to make sure you don't overflow the prompt size (e.g. in retrieval augmented generation). You want to give the LLM as many facts as will fit in the prompt to improve the quality of its response. So even with billions of dollars... token counting is a thing.