231–240 of 343 posts
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That works out to 8 million per person on average. I'd be interested to see if the Pareto distribution holds here as well, namely that 1% of employees (26) hold half the wealth ($10b).
Don't you mean Zipfian distribution?
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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!
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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.
You won't enjoy my comment then :) Yes, jobs are voluntary. The vast majority of people could choose not to have a job and not to entertain certain luxuries in life like having a roof over one's head or food on the table. Some even (voluntarily!) choose not to have a roof over their head because they don't like the idea of having a job.
Taking job A over job B could be described as voluntary but saying that you could just be homeless and scrounge food, especially in locations where the local government makes this illegal, so working is voluntary is just wrong
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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
The domain probably isn't that complicated, but the infrastructure certainly was (and this was all pre-cloud so they built it themselves).
But yeah, FB's success came from a base level of keeping the site up and incredibly good tactics to drive growth and distribution.
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Jane Street has been doing this since they were much smaller. I interned there when they had like 300 people, and they were actively cultivating a great brand as an employer back then too—and looks like they've really made it work over the last decade! My impression with them in general was that they were willing to do lots of things that did not "conventionally" make sense at their size, and those things paid off. T…
> Most people would see this as wasteful NIH Because it is. What is the point of reinventing these wheels when gazillions of man hours have already been invested on open source tools that can do it better and cheaper?
2. Building something for yourself is qualitatively different than building something for somebody else. (I've heard this described as "situated software"[1].) Both the results and the process are different.
3. Building something yourself lets you become an expert in the domain and the tool you're building, often faster and deeper than using somebody else's system. It's a way to build up tacit knowledge and institutional capital as much as (or even more than) software.
4. More often than people realize, building something yourself ends up simply faster than first learning and then wrestling an existing tool into the exact shape you need. I've seen a lot of teams waste way more time trying to get some existing thing working than they would have spent building their own thing.
Obviously it isn't always true that building your own version of something makes sense, and nobody is going to be building everything from scratch... but it makes sense far more often than conventional wisdom dictates.
[1]: Term originally coined by Clay Shirky, but I can't find the original essay online, but looks like Gwern hosts a copy: https://gwern.net/doc/technology/2004-03-30-shirky-situateds...
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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
Also, it goes Php -> HipHop (compile PHP to C++) -> HHVM (compile PHP to a virtual machine running ASM).
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Any tips for getting a first quant job ? Is learning C++ a must?
When we hire a junior person we are interested in math background, ability to communicate real world value of various models to our investment process and familiarity with computer science and software engineering concepts more than we care about experience with specific languages or technologies. That being said, C++ does still dominate this space so having exposure to it certainly would not hurt.
If I remember correctly they are also by far the biggest poster child for OCaml, right? Blub Paradox at play here?
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…
I don't claim to be a rockstar developer or anything close. But my capabilities and efficiency as a developer are tightly coupled to the tech stack I use (not just language).
I moved from a job where I chose my own tech stack that I iterated over several years to one where I'm forced to use (IMHO) tools that are poorly suited to my work, and I'd say the quality and volume of my work has dropped by at least 10x.
So I think it's both. You need smart people, but they also need to be using the right tools for the job.
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This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others. Maybe for a similar set of skills, JS doesn't pay (much) more than Meta or Google?
> 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.
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Maybe quite the opposite. Wall Street and Finance is can be very aggressive and learn it for yourself. I learned math of finance from a professor I'm pretty sure was quanting on the Street at the time. When I told him one of the constants in our little trading game was off by a factor of 10x, he said prove it. My final talk was: "How to make 2.3 million dollars in 30 days using options." The real lesson wasn't about…
Fair enough; I wasn't applying for a quant position, just a software job. Looking back, I suspect the real reason that they were even considering me was because I had professional Haskell and Scala experience on my resume, and so I looked appealing, particularly if a dropout was learning it for fun. What I find amusing is that I'm categorically a much better functional programmer now than I was then, with professiona…