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Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

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Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#141

Post by __oh_es »

paxys wrote: post #112
ethbr1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the thousands under them are getting salaries. The difference is that these thousands also get to invest in Jane Street, which seems a pretty profitable investment (70% margins, etc).

Typically at such companies you have to be at the very top of the hierarchy to be able to buy in and get a slice of the profits. It is very unlikely that rank and file employees are able to participate, at least at a scale larger than, say, a Google employee buying some extra shares.

$100k buy in at the hedgefund I know. Its a big figure for most but starting salaries, friends & family, and personal loans will get you there.

>20% return is quite easy to justify. You're also looking at a 50%-200% annual bonus, mostly leaning to the higher end of the range.

Its a very different world!

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#142

Post by MichaelZuo »

paxys wrote: post #139
MichaelZuo wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who decided on that definition? In my books share ownership can be unequal, so long as the bottom rung still have a few shares each.

Anyone can make up their own definition, but there are also some standard ones – e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Like I said, please provide actual names or organizations with credible authority, such as the OED, and link the source.

EDIT: I'm not going to do this work for you and dig through all the places cited at the bottom to see if there's some source with that credible authority that proposes such a definition.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#143

Post by strikelaserclaw »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #116
mrweasel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might also be that Jane Street is to OCaml what WhatsApp was to Erlang. Many ascribed the success of the small team at WhatsApp to their tech-stack, Erlang and FreeBSD. The reality probably was that they had hired really smart people, and those people choose to use Erlang (because eJabberd), but they could have been just as successful using another language. Yes, Jane Street uses OCaml, they have no reason to stop us…

> but they could have been just as successful using another language. I remember reading about one founder that picked an obscure language because in doing so, it self-selected for more curious engineers who worked in the languages for fun rather than any other practical (re:job) reasons. His thesis is that finding one really good engineer in said language was 1 in 10 (10 interviews to find 1 really good engineer) wh…

tons of successful companies (facebook) were founded on apps written in php (thought to be one of the lowest common denominator of the language world at one time).

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#144

Post by JackFr »

paxys wrote: post #87

> The only founder still at the firm is Rob Granieri, but insiders say it is functionally run by roughly 30-40 senior executives in what kinda resembles an incredibly profitable anarchist commune. Or as Jane Street itself puts it: > We operate as a functionally-organized structure consisting of various management and risk committees. Each committee is responsible for directing the overall strategy of the firm and for…

Honestly 40-50 years ago all of the big investment banks were partnerships and operated in much the same way. Partners owned equity and by today's standards they were relatively risk averse because it was their money to lose, with no stock price to pump up.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#145

Post by ethagnawl »

andrew_eu wrote: post #86

I often discuss Jane Street as a great model of employee branding. They do well placed adverts/sponsorships (e.g. Standup Maths[0]), they produce a quite decent quality podcast (Signals and Threads [1]), and they have consistent monthly puzzles [2]. That level of investment in branding only makes sense, I think, at a large size. I'm kind of surprised they only have ~2500 people. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/stand…

They used to be very active in the NYC Meetup scene, too. ~~I think I visited at least two of their offices and the second was was stunning. It was far south enough and high enough that there was a nearly unobstructed 200° view of the southern end of Manhattan, both rivers, etc. It was also beautifully designed and had an obligatorily huge, open, stocked kitchen.~~ (This was actually Two Sigma.) They were also using exotic tech back then, too, like OCaml, which is itself a form of marketing and helps with recruitment.

Moral qualms aside, it must be a fascinating place to work.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#146

Post by andoando »

jfrbfbreudh wrote: post #66
SkipperCat wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SWE will probably make between 250-500k. Quants who can come up with profitable trading strategies can make a lot more. Managers of trading teams can make over 1MM and sometime a lot over 1MM depending on how profitable their teams perform. SWE who have deep subject matter experience are super valuable to these firms. Folks who understand how to write low latency code, FPGA work and other stuff like that. But the rea…

I work at a competing firm and our SWE new grads make $420-470k (including signing bonus). JS pays their new grads similarly, just a tiny bit lower.

Hire me and ill be your slave

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#147

Post by queuebert »

paxys wrote: post #104
CharlieDigital wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second definition of "anarchy" according to Google: > the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism. Sounds like a perfect fit.

There is a CEO on top who has the power to fire anyone. There are department heads and middle managers. There is an org hierarchy. There are performance targets and reviews. Nothing about it is "voluntary cooperation". This is how every large company runs.

Especially this given how selective they are in hiring. There are likely hundreds of people salivating at the chance to replace you.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#148

Post by drgiggles »

I work in quantitative finance and have wanted to to start using OCaml at work for years. I just find that unless you are at a shop like Jane Street with a well developed proprietary code base, internally developed tooling, etc, there just isn't the ecosystem available for me to be nearly as productive as I can be in other well accepted languages in the quant dev space...which is a bummer. It's been a little while since the last time I investigated this though.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#149

Post by CharlieDigital »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #143
CharlieDigital wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but they could have been just as successful using another language. I remember reading about one founder that picked an obscure language because in doing so, it self-selected for more curious engineers who worked in the languages for fun rather than any other practical (re:job) reasons. His thesis is that finding one really good engineer in said language was 1 in 10 (10 interviews to find 1 really good engineer) wh…

tons of successful companies (facebook) were founded on apps written in php (thought to be one of the lowest common denominator of the language world at one time).

Facebook, even early on, wasn't really what I would consider very technical in both engineering and domain complexity.

When FB started to grow, it needed the HipHop VM[0] to make it scalable beyond PHP. I'd agree that PHP is a lowest common denominator and FB eventually needed to move beyond it to get to the next level.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#150

Post by CooCooCaCha »

paxys wrote: post #104
CharlieDigital wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second definition of "anarchy" according to Google: > the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism. Sounds like a perfect fit.

There is a CEO on top who has the power to fire anyone. There are department heads and middle managers. There is an org hierarchy. There are performance targets and reviews. Nothing about it is "voluntary cooperation". This is how every large company runs.

I hate, so much, when people refer to jobs as voluntary cooperation.

Maybe at the very top when you have more money than you’ll ever need, but for the vast majority of people jobs aren’t truly voluntary.

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