Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus • Hacker News Board

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#151

Post by dchftcs » Thu, May 02, 2024, 1:49 PM UTC

ethbr1 wrote: post #95

chii wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

only 1 founding partner is still there apparently (from the article). Rob Granieri

It makes you wonder if there's a retirement-encouraged culture for inactive partners. Which is probably what you'd want in a high-performance firm, less everyone look at the absent top level extractors and it turn into a law firm.

Equity holders are probably forever, and the incentive problems are a hard thing to solve. But you won't be a founder or early joiner if you're not allowed to keep your equity anyway.

Fortunately it doesn't take that much to get top talent, because so many other companies underpay. Jane Street only has to pay out a small fraction of their PnL and doesn't even need to have a non-compete.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#152

Post by UK-Al05 » Thu, May 02, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

sevagh wrote: post #137

UK-Al05 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying people interested in OCaml are the best. I'm saying you don't have to worry about smart people being incapable of understanding OCaml. You got the direction the wrong way around. Ask to introduce OCaml at any company. The first thing is they're worried about is not being able to find people. To which the answer is to train them. But then they're worried some people just won't be able to learn ocaml qui…

I think you equating people that aren't OCaml or Jane Street caliber as "bottom of the bucket" was a touch inflammatory.

Companies that want to maintain the ability to outsource or hire cheap developers if push comes to shove is actually pretty common. They want commodity labour.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#153

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 02, 2024, 1:52 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#154

Post by queuebert » Thu, May 02, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

syntaxing wrote: post #108

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their revenue per employee is probably similar to revenue of a single mid size company.

They made 10B net in 2023 (supposedly)…that’s a ballpark of 4M net revenue per employee. What mid size company makes 4M net per employee?!

GOOG, which has a reputation of being slightly bloated, made $138 billion in revenue across 140,000 employees. That's $2.3 million per employee.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#155

Post by queuebert » Thu, May 02, 2024, 1:57 PM UTC

gpderetta wrote: post #71

gruez wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the Pareto distribution was most famously associated with 80-20? Of course you can change α to get whatever ratio you want but this is the first time I heard of the 50-1 ratio being used.

A power-law distribution probably describes it better.

Pareto is a power-law distribution.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#156

Post by kqr » Thu, May 02, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

belinder wrote: post #20

Why do they say 179,000 million instead of 179 billion? Is that common in their industry?

Because 179,000 million is a 179 milliard, not 179 billion, which would be 179,000 milliard!

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#157

Post by queuebert » Thu, May 02, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

llm_trw wrote: post #25

belinder wrote: post #20

Why do they say 179,000 million instead of 179 billion? Is that common in their industry?

Why do we say 17,000 kilometers instead of 17 megameters?

Scientists don't use either. If using SI units, they would say 1.7 x 10^7 m, or 1.7e7 in code, which is even shorter.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#158

Post by hoosieree » Thu, May 02, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

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…

Talented people are valuable in general which gives them bargaining power so they can demand to use their preferred tech regardless of whether that tech is niche or not.

I generally agree with the notion that talented folks are more likely to explore niche tech. Just be careful making the leap from "they prefer niche X" to "therefore they are talented".

Two anecdotes:

1. I'm an average programmer who likes niche tech.

2. My friend is 10x more talented than me, but he likes mainstream tech.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#159

Post by hcks » Thu, May 02, 2024, 2:03 PM UTC

lupire wrote: post #83

chronic830021 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. 900k is average including janitors and HR. Median for SWE most definitely over $1 million. Turnover of 6%? No way people stick around “only” making 500-600k new grad comp. Check levels.fyi > Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others And some high-level SWEs at JS make 9 figures, not 900k.

Some high level SWEs at Google are billionaires.

Highly doubt that

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#160

Post by geodel » Thu, May 02, 2024, 2:03 PM UTC

sgt wrote: post #49

Whenever OCaml stories popped up about Jane Street, I always figured they were about 30-40 employees by now. 2613 people?!

Well 30-40 or more would be just needed to maintain OCaml codebase. Unless basic unit of bonus, salary, buying, selling, vendor payments, building maintenance and so on is OCaml lines of code, I would have guessed ~1000 people for sure.