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Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

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Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#281

Post by tombert »

moneywoes wrote: post #270
tombert wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did you find WGU? Has it helped?

Sort of a difficult question to answer if I'm being honest, because I'm kind of a strange outlier case.

I was a dropout for almost a decade, but managed to find work at big corporations somehow [1], and the entire time I was pretty obsessed with learning CS theory; partly because I liked it and partly because it made interviews easier. By the time I had decided to finish school and enroll in WGU, I already had roughly a bachelors' degree of education in CS anyway. And that's not just a pseudo-intellectual assertion on my end, I finished all my classes in a single term, most classes were completed in a week.

I don't think it's helped my job prospects much; I had already had senior level positions at Apple and Jet.com/Walmart Labs by the time I went back to school, and I suspect that they look better on my resume than a bachelors in CS from WGU.

(If you're curious, the reason I went back at all was so I would be qualified for a PhD program, which as far as I can tell universally requires at least a bachelors, and usually a masters, so I just wanted to check off a box. I'm not 100% sure why I wanted a PhD; I think my brain had fetishized professorships and CS research)

So it's tough to answer directly. I think for someone starting out today a degree from WGU is better than no degree, and I think the education they gave was "just fine". If you're ok with not working in Wall Street, it's enough to get you to the interview phase. If your goal is to work in Wall Street or to become a lawyer, it's probably better holding off until you can get into a "brand name" school.

I'm happy enough in my current position and they don't really care where I went to school, but I do believe that they had a firm requirement for a bachelors (I don't bother checking), and I like my current gig so it's probably worth it.

[1] I dropped out in 2012, which turned out to be just about the best time to drop out. It seems like everyone on earth suddenly had a smartphone and there was a shortage of engineers as a result.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#282

Post by gosub100 »

drgiggles wrote: post #148

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…

It's brilliant if you think about it as an employer that wants to limit employee turnover. Great, you're an ace algo dev in OCaml, where you gonna jump ship to?

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#283

Post by cess11 »

DrBazza wrote: post #208
cess11 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F# came out in 2005, and was quite limited compared to the language it became from 2010 onwards.

Betas were certainly around 2002-03. Though thanks for the reminder that .NET was in a beta around 2000, so 90s is wrong (that's when I started work so my memory is sketchy that far back). CSFB was always a big MS shop and often trialled software before public release. https://fsharp.org/history/hopl-final/hopl-fsharp.pdf

Ah, sure, I wouldn't know anything about pre-release stuff, I was busy being an unruly adolescent at the time.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#284

Post by fire_lake »

acegopher wrote: post #164
fire_lake wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is all about allowing many different organisational structures where the fitness function is profitability. Where it goes wrong is when the regulator fails to stop foul play…

It also went wrong using only profitability as the only measure. Obviously an unprofitable company isn't long-term sustainable, but a maximally profitable company might not be either, as a company exists within a society and on a planet with limited resources.

Such a company, with no long term plan, wouldn’t be able to raise capital.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#285

Post by ebiester »

tikhonj wrote: post #235
hyperbovine wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'd say the key insight that I see on #4 is that people do not consider libraries code. They consider it black box. It is the same urge that causes teams to label a code base they have taken over "legacy" and "in need of rewrite."

Sometimes, the answer is to dive in an seek to understand it. Now, that may end up meaning that you fork the tool or contribute back to it. It may mean that you choose to build anyway, and it may mean that you come back understanding it. However, if a library is not working for you, the slowest answer is often the one where you fiddle with it until it's working without taking the time to dive in.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#286

Post by tasuki »

lovich wrote: post #233
tasuki wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Food is not a luxury. Defining things necessary for continued existence as luxuries is ridiculously reductive and is why defining jobs as “voluntary” in a world where access to those things is gated by having a job for most people is disingenuous. 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 mak…

You are of course right that food is not a luxury, that was supposed to be slightly tongue in cheek.

One can still choose to disobey the local government and be homeless. I'm not saying it's an easy choice, nor am I saying it's easy to be homeless. I'm just saying it's a choice.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#287

Post by bmoxb »

yodsanklai wrote: post #82
UK-Al05 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OCaml is more of symptom of the people who they hire. Most companies don't want to hire OCaml and Haskellers. They fear they would be too expensive, and requires clear thinking so you can't hire bottom of the bucket devs. If you want to hire the best and willing to pay that is no longer a concern

> 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 interviewed there and can confirm they don't require you to know any OCaml (though I did have some Haskell on my CV - I don't know if that was a factor in hearing back or not). The questions are LC-adjacent but the interview is structured such that each question builds on the previous one.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#288

Post by CooCooCaCha »

tasuki wrote: post #280
CooCooCaCha wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, I don’t like your comment. It always amazes me how heartless you libertarian types can be. Food and a roof are basics, not a luxury. The fact that a significant number of people in this world don’t have those things speaks more to our failure to provide. Do better.

I'm actually not a libertarian. I guess I'm your standard European socialist: I'm all good taxing (us) rich and providing for the poor. It still is a choice whether one chooses to work, as evidenced by those who chose not to. Edit: the "luxuries" was slightly tongue in cheek and perhaps didn't land well. Anyway, you're free to move to the wilderness, hunt/grow your own food, build your own shelter, and do without the…

You could have fooled me because that is the same immature definition of voluntary and choice that libertarians espouse.

Voluntary is not binary. If someone put a gun to your head and told you to eat shit you technically have a choice but it's not much of choice is it?

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#289

Post by detourdog »

ethagnawl wrote: post #145
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…

I used to ride the train with someone at Two Sigma. His hobby was working on better NTP boxes.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#290

Post by renewiltord »

999900000999 wrote: post #215
drgiggles wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does Fintech experience matter at all. I'm still in the finance space, but I'm very much just an average software engineer. I've been meaning to learn C++, but I always find it intimidating.

Doesn't matter. It's same as any tech. Need to understand mathematics and algos and have great fluency in code. Can't speak for the other guy but I suspect he's same: no amount of skill "aligning stakeholders" and "managing cross-functional teams" is of much use in the business if you're at a prop shop. Have to be able to write code. No "blocked on other team", "Kernel Timestamping API is undocumented" etc.
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