Sooooo hard to get hired here. I’m convinced it’s impossible without a referral or something
> Sooooo hard to get hired here.
Did you apply and get rejected?
Understanding Jane Street
301–310 of 392 posts
Re: Understanding Jane Street
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I'm not sure whether someone who has done quant finance can make meaningful contributions to the actual science. So if your role ends up spending money and doing top-level management, why not just fund companies that do and stay in finance? [edit] To add one prominent example - it's doable, as Jeff Hawki…
> as if you can jump into a field without spending 10-20 years of learning and do cutting-edge research. I know multiple people who have done this. If you want a famous person, look at Paul Erdős. Always jumping into new areas of mathematics and solving problems at the cutting edge. Or, to get to the current subject, Taleb using his background as a trader to jump to a career in academia, where many consider(ed) his r…
>Taleb
He already had a PhD so it's not surprising he was able to enter Academia. But outside his books I'm not aware of anyone talking about his Research much.
Re: Understanding Jane Street
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hawkins is a notorious con artist with nothing to show for almost two decades of work.
I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science.
> I can't judge that from an outside perspective, but to be fair, having nothing to show for two decades of work is an intrinsic occupational risk of science.
How? In today's academic environment you won't survive even a few years without publishable research results.
Re: Understanding Jane Street
#304There's one thing that always baffles me about this kind of market work. Let's for the sake of argument assume that HFT and other sophisticated market making activities are crucial for price discovery and other great social benefits. Then why does this amazingly important social good get mostly turned off over 80% of the time[1]? Even as a retail buy-and-hold investor in boring ETFs not being able to trade outside no…
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Re: Understanding Jane Street
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what's going on with this comment so let me make three observations: The speed (latency) of the EM spectrum is the effective celerity of the medium: this doesn't differ in the air between microwave and shortwave in any meaningful way. The speed (throughput) achievable on a given frequency is limited by the period of that frequence, high wavelengths can modulate more signal. Microwaves are higher frequenc…
Shortwave radio can be transmitted around the curve of Earth by ionospheric reflection and refraction so fewer repeaters are needed. This allows crossing vast oceans where microwave infrastructure might not be possible. As you say the downside is available bandwidth and throughput.
Another good point, and one I thought about before replying, but that doesn't make microwaves slower, it makes them inapplicable.
Re: Understanding Jane Street
#306>the winners get a job from which people routinely retire rich in their 30s, and the losers... don't Honestly, I find this ridiculous. Firstly, Yes, working at Jane Street is a well paying job and you'll do well out of it. No. People aren't routinely retiring in their 30s. I don't understand where this absurd idea comes from. Look at all the rich people in the world, look at how old they are, and ask, are they retire…
I think there is also a big question of what sort of spending habits these people have acquired. Their peers are making lot of money. And I doubt everyone is extremely frugal. Margin Call I think gave pretty good example how some in other firms might be spending their income. Stepping down and just starting to live on annuity might not fit to what they have come to expect.
The culture of HFT (CS/JS/CHI.*/Optiver/IMC) is not 80/90/2000’s IB.
Re: Understanding Jane Street
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s why most markets close during night time.
No it isn’t. Most markets, in terms of their daily volume, are open at night, but very thinly traded until EU hours, but some do see action in Asia hours. It’s just about liquidity. Maybe you’re thinking of single name equity markets, which are a fraction of daily trading.
I think they’re probably asking about US markets. Afaik those do close at business hours and I’m not sure how after hours trading happens but it might not be available to most people.
I think the one of the main reasons is government concerns about shenanigans happen overnight without oversight / flash crash. That being said I presume all the breakers that would halt trading activity are probably automatic but potentially not all of them (I think the US did things like that during the housing collapse).
Re: Understanding Jane Street
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, sure, and that game is not lifting the market, generally speaking.
Other market makers are often moving away from something they've seen but you haven't yet. When whatever that is hits you, the fills you got from the other market maker will look really bad.
Sure, but those short-term active strategies have little impact next to what big paper will lift in major macro markets.
Re: Understanding Jane Street
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every few months or so I run out of patience with C++ and wonder about the alternatives, of which there seem to be very few in HFT. Jane Street stands out for that reason. It's a smaller talent pool but I don't think it's a subset of those that the C++ shops can attract.
Rust is getting pretty popular among low latency firms. Many of my peers (myself included) would definitely show interest in a rust shop. OCaml - not so much.
> OCaml - not so much.
Is that only because OCaml has more of an FP flavor, or is it something else about the language?
Re: Understanding Jane Street
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that's not the interesting part, right? That would be like saying that tech is simply assembling prototypes. The really interesting decisions are the strategic ones that require both a high-level overview of the opportunity landscape and some foundational knowledge of its feasibility. Or am I mistaken and it's simply brute force trials?
Yeah you’re right. My point is that the technical bar for entry is low, and can be attained maybe by spending one year in a top lab. You then skip the hazing ritual that is the PhD and postdoc and directly start your own small lab. Spend your money attending conferences to make connections and get yourself updated in the field. Hire technicians to help with your grunt work. Spend your days reading research papers, di…
The bar for doing some experiments, in an environment with tons of logistical, technical, and intellectual support, is indeed pretty low. A high school student could certainly learn to run a gel in a week or two; patching a neuron might take a few months.However, the physical "act" of collecting data, especially in the happy case where all of the conditions have been worked out and the results look "as expected", is a very small part of being a scientist.
More often, you are trying something that hasn't been done before and you're getting results that don't quite make sense. Here, experience and background knowledge seem key, and I'm not sure that you'll pick up much of that in a year, even in a "top lab" because experiments are slow. On top of that, you'll need to learn how to design experiments and analyze/present their results in ways that your peers find convincing, which is in itself a non-trivial skill. All this presumes that you're even able to find your way into a "top lab", but that's not a foregone conclusion either: these places can be incredibly selective even among people with a decade of experience in the same field.
Put another way, your answer assumes there's a lot of fat to trim in the PhD/postdoc stages. What is it and can it really be cut down by 90% as you propose?