Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus • Hacker News Board

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#291

Post by neilv » Thu, May 02, 2024, 7:37 PM UTC

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…

I highlighted Jane Street's recruiting outreaches specifically, when talking with an R&D unit at a big financial institution. (I also mentioned the tactic of fringe-tech-that-some-heavy-hitters-love. OCaml, Lisp, Rust, Erlang, etc.)

When I first heard of Jane Street, it sounded like Yaron Minsky was going around to MIT and such, high-touch, trying to hire just a few people. And later, things like this blog: https://blog.janestreet.com/author/yminsky/

The only negative thing I recall hearing is Jane Street alumni responsible for the infamous FTX and Alameda Research. I don't know whether the individuals were already fully into hopped-up sociopathic/narcissistic thinking in college, or whether their internship and employment experience contributed.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#292

Post by cess11 » Thu, May 02, 2024, 7:40 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #244

cess11 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might want to shape developers on the job and bet that it's on average cheaper to do with functional-curious people rather than those that have professional experience in ML-languages.

Yeah fair, I definitely have developed pretty strong opinions on the "right" way to do things in functional languages, and those opinions likely do differ somewhat from theirs, at least in some cases. I think if I want to work at Jane Street now, I either need to finish my PhD, or get a Masters degree from a sexy school to "cleanse" my WGU degree (despite the fact that I don't think I know much less than the average…

One reason for recruiting from 'high end' unis is the kind of social networks those graduates are more likely to belong to. They are also more likely to have access to more candidates that you would like to evaluate and possibly give an offer, compared to 'lower end' unis.

I'm not saying that I think this order of things is jolly good, but from the perspective of this kind of business sector it makes sense. Personally I avoid finance related sectors, a stint at a casino operator to get some experience on the CV was enough for me.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#293

Post by autoexecbat » Thu, May 02, 2024, 7:41 PM UTC

twic wrote: post #264

tikhonj wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think it depends on if the targeted application is essential to your companies core buisness/product.

As an example, say if you're a small cloud vendor, you should probably write your own machine OS imaging automation, but probably not your own chat client.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#294

Post by caddemon » Thu, May 02, 2024, 7:48 PM UTC

neilv wrote: post #291

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…

I highlighted Jane Street's recruiting outreaches specifically, when talking with an R&D unit at a big financial institution. (I also mentioned the tactic of fringe-tech-that-some-heavy-hitters-love. OCaml, Lisp, Rust, Erlang, etc.) When I first heard of Jane Street, it sounded like Yaron Minsky was going around to MIT and such, high-touch, trying to hire just a few people. And later, things like this blog: https://b…

It seems their thinking is part of what led them to JS in the first place, which is a bit of negative and maybe they had some ideas reinforced there. But I also think they were some of the more extreme ones to begin with. They obviously didn't internalize JS's concerns about risk at all lol.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#295

Post by wuj » Thu, May 02, 2024, 7:55 PM UTC

Yeah, quants firms are great at PR and marketing. They give out free merch, sponsor hackathons, and organize in-person events with all expenses paid. I study at Berkeley and so many students here rock their merch, which gave them even more exposure on campus.

Their effort definitely paid off though. Quants like JS, Citadel, or Jump hire some of the brightest students from Berkeley and other top CS schools.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#296

Post by wuj » Thu, May 02, 2024, 7:57 PM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #174

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…

Any tips for getting a first quant job ? Is learning C++ a must?

Good intuition in probabilities is a must.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#297

Post by ethbr1 » Thu, May 02, 2024, 8:05 PM UTC

robertlagrant wrote: post #122

paxys wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you can afford to buy in to a company that valuable then you probably aren't a regular employee, yes.

Afaik (not my field, but well-docunented) prop shops like Jane Street don't take outside money.

So they're incentivized to allow as many of their employees to invest as possible.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#298

Post by wuj » Thu, May 02, 2024, 8:10 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #77

Smaug123 wrote: post #13

> 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

A little further down: > The real money is at the top. The bond prospectus reveals that Jane Street has 40 “equity unit holders on a full-time basis and in good standing”, with an average tenure of 16 years. Among those there will be at least a handful of billionaires, even if no Jane Streeter appears on any rich lists. Sounds like any other partnership. A few people at the top are providing the equity and getting a…

Rentech uses this model too. The equity-to-salary ratio of an employee increases the longer they remain at the firm. It's for incentivizing employees to stick with the firm in the long run such that they don't work for any other firms and become a competitor (especially true in trading given the small population of talents).

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#299

Post by govg » Thu, May 02, 2024, 8:15 PM UTC

barneygale wrote: post #260

__oh_es wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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!

> $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. Surely this is a HN culture bubble? Very few people can borrow tens of thousands of dollars from family and friends to lend to a hedge fund . Not only would I be refused, I'd damage friendships by exposing the moral vacuum at my core.

It has more to do with the nature of the industry and firm. If your TC yearly is all cash and exceeds 500k, asking 100k of that as buy in is not too different from being granted stock options as an outcome. They could just reduce your TC by 100k one year and replace it with equity in the pool.

Re: Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

#300

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 02, 2024, 8:34 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #203

walthamstow wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hectolitre is 100 litres, not 100ml, but hectogram is 100g, not 100kg? Very confusing!

I mean Hecto = 100 Hectoliter = 100 litres Hectogram = 100 grams Kilo = 1000 Kiloliter = 1000 litres Kilogram = 1000 grams It doesn't look that confusing?

[deleted]