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 si…
Any tips for getting a first quant job ? Is learning C++ a must?
Get a Bloomberg Terminal - just for the social-networking features.
Are you telling me that one of American capitalism's peaks is basically a worker collective?
In a worker collective every worker has a single vote and workers are paid proportional to the value they add. Jane Street shares and profits are proportional to the capital you invest/accumulate.
> proportional to the value they add
How do you quantify, or even loosely, determine that?
What about ancillary workers who might not add any significant value to the (e.g. office janitor or HR) but supposing there’s a serious janitor or HR shortage then the org will still have to pay enough to attract someone, but what they pay is outside of their control and unrelated to the actual value to the company. And even in a worker-owned cooperative there’s still going to be in-groups and out-groups, and the in-group is incentivised to pay the out-group as little as possible as to maximise their own returns.
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…
I used to work there - the jane street code review software is awesome, kind of like graphite but it works reliably. You can write a big tree of PRs. PRs get reviewed separately and you can merge them in any order at your leisure, without worrying too much about rebase issues or clobbering review or whatever. I would love to have some open source thing like that that actually works nearly as well. It may exist, but I…
Revup does a good job of integrating tree-of-PRs workflows into GitHub, and is also designed so that one developer can use it in a way mostly transparent to reviewers or their colleagues. I _think_ that Revup + Reviewable.io would match much of the capabilities listed in the linked talk.
> 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?
1. You can do it better, with better taste. Existing tools are... not uniformly well-designed. 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…
Where i work, there is a lot of NIH wheel-reinvention. People make exactly these arguments for it. I think it's mostly nonsense.
I used to work there - the jane street code review software is awesome, kind of like graphite but it works reliably. You can write a big tree of PRs. PRs get reviewed separately and you can merge them in any order at your leisure, without worrying too much about rebase issues or clobbering review or whatever. I would love to have some open source thing like that that actually works nearly as well. It may exist, but I…
Revup does a good job of integrating tree-of-PRs workflows into GitHub, and is also designed so that one developer can use it in a way mostly transparent to reviewers or their colleagues. I _think_ that Revup + Reviewable.io would match much of the capabilities listed in the linked talk. https://github.com/Skydio/revup
The issue I've run into with graphite, for example, is that it gets confused by things like squash merges.
I think fundamentally a merge-based workflow, which git(hub) encourages, is kind of inimical to stacked PRs compared to rebase-based workflows.
The tech billionaires are far richer than quant finance billionaires. And I would bet that tech SWE has a far higher probability of launching you into $10M+ range than quant finance. I don’t know that a few more single digit billionaires (if that is even true) puts quant finance ahead of tech SWE in terms of potential rewards for the “ambitious”. Also, quality of life is far better for tech SWE.
> And I would bet that tech SWE has a far higher probability of launching you into $10M+ range than quant finance $1B net worth? Google has more SWEs than the entire quant finance industry globally. Yet Google could only produce what, 4 billionaires? $10M TC at Google? That’s at most 500 VPs out of 150,000 employees. That’s 0.3%. Not good odds. More than 7 people (0.3% x 2500) at Jane Street are making $10M+… Same lo…
> Most companies don't want to hire OCaml and Haskellers Most companies don't even know that these are programming languages. Also don't assume people interested in these languages are "the best". Regarding JS, this is all hearsay, but I think nowadays they hire good profiles (competitive programmers / olympiad winner / top graduates from prestigious schools), ask them hard leetcode questions, and teach them OCaml (w…
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…
To be fair, another reason for avoiding OCaml, or other kinds of almost-esoteric tooling is a business need for longevity of support and of the ecosystem: if you choose something like Java you have a reasonable belief that, at any point in the next 20 years, if something breaks then you’ll be able to call a phone-number and pay through the nose to get it working again. Companies don’t mind paying large amounts of money for an expert, provided those experts are available. But in 2024 try finding an expert for some dBase 4GL system from 1998 that only runs on AS400.
> At the end of 2023, Jane Street employed 2631 people > About 80 per cent of the company's capital comes from employee equity, which has swelled to $21.3bn at the end of 2023 o.O
Are you telling me that one of American capitalism's peaks is basically a worker collective?
> one of American capitalism's peaks is basically a worker collective?
Finance tends to pay its workers better than shareholders—most banks’ trading and IB groups pay out more than 50% of profits to workers.
I come from a very small provincial university, but they still reached out to me 2018, so I don't think so. (I bombed their interview and didn't get an offer, though).
In 2016 I was still a dropout and they did an interview with me. I also bombed it. I have applied about a dozen times since then after getting my degree from WGU and they haven’t gotten back to me; I almost wonder if not putting any college experience on the resume was a blind spot for their filter.