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What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#11

Post by armchairhacker »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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.

“objectively inferior” is rare if it happens at all. Maybe you’re resume will never be good enough in Jane Street’s eyes to get an interview, but unless you also write fintech in OCaml, I bet you’re better than the interns at some niche in software development.

These are young interns too. If you’re a senior dev, after a few months of learning OCaml and the popular open-source Jane Street libraries, you maybecould implement any one of these projects.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#12

Post by LambdaComplex »

Dudester230602 wrote: post #5
laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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?

Because some people would rather be good engineers than be rich.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#14

Post by laidoffamazon »

armchairhacker wrote: post #11
laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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.

“objectively inferior” is rare if it happens at all. Maybe you’re resume will never be good enough in Jane Street’s eyes to get an interview, but unless you also write fintech in OCaml, I bet you’re better than the interns at some niche in software development. These are young interns too. If you’re a senior dev, after a few months of learning OCaml and the popular open-source Jane Street libraries, you maybecould im…

I dunno, 2 of these are at top CS schools that I can't get into, and most of their intern class is from Harvard/CMU/MIT/Stanford/Waterloo and the like. I think I might actually just be objectively inferior in all regards, not just technical or in software.

I've got ~5 years of full time experience, I make decent to good money (though I don't think most people on HN would agree lol) but I'm skeptical I could build these projects.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#15

Post by rvrs »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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?

I don't have to deal with this because I don't have a weird inferiority complex towards people who work at some trading firm. The people I know who work there are decent programmers, but as luck would have it I know good programmers outside of Jane Street as well.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#16

Post by charred_patina »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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.

> how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street?

How do I deal with being inferior to Alexander the Great? You just acknowledge that you are you, with your own quirks and limitations. Being surrounded by people who appreciate you makes you not really care about comparisons.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#17

Post by techbro92 »

chatmasta wrote: post #4

I 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…

They might be analyzing sentiment with LLMs somehow. Which could be a larger scale task.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#20

Post by jjtheblunt »

GolDDranks wrote: post #13

TIL: "wrought" means about the same as "worked", but it has a more "tangible" sense to it, like doing some smithery/forgery.

I had years of germanic linguistics in undergrad and grad school, and i think this is an alternate ("archaic") past tense of work, so it's literally "worked", just like you said a blacksmith would do.

i mention the germanic classes because i can't at the moment think of other examples where (outside arabic etc) there's a commutativity between a consonant and vowel (work & wrokt) but i'd swear i would think of some if not trying.

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