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Understanding Jane Street

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Re: Understanding Jane Street

#331

Post by unixbane »

Why do all these companies with pretentious attitudes exist when the average* software still takes 30 seconds to show a paragraph of text? Ironically whenever these companies take the security test, they not only fall flat on their face, but are proven to not have the slightest clue how to do basic stuff like string escaping. I actually looked at the code for one of the top Haskell companies with the same attitude, and the story I just wrote is precisely what happened. Jane street sounds like a level 2 company like these Haskell companies and Cloudflare: They can escape strings, but only in places that have been famously exploited thousands of times, like SQL; they don't know how to actually know when the problem presents itself in a different unusual context, which they may have made themselves. It seems you need a million dollar employee income to reach level 3, and for level 4+ you simply need to be someone who is genuinely interested in the topic (as there is no monetary incentive) and have spent 10 years reaching it. Also, this applies to all aspects of tech, not just software security.

* not even average, this describes almost all software made in the last 20 years.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#332

Post by pushrax »

samatman wrote: post #305
pushrax wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In theory having fewer repeaters improves latency, probably in the range of 100ns per repeater. I don't know how much of a practical effect that has, likely very minimal with modern implementations.

Either way it's more sensible to build high throughput microwave networks given the tiny amount of shortwave bandwidth we have.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#333

Post by steveBK123 »

kyawzazaw wrote: post #313
bitcharmer wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this to some extent. However in case of firms like Jane or Citadel or Quadrature you have to have a well documented, long track record of accomplishments in various orgs before your CV lands on their desks. These companies hire from a different pool than you described.

I don't know if that is true. As a new grad, I got invited to interview for Point72, Headlands Tech, HRT, Two Sigma. (although some of these are in a different "tier", and different business than Jane Street or Citadel). I definitely didn't have more special accomplishments than 2 typical internships and both were not FAANG.

I should have been more specific in my trite original post. I think at the college hire / intern level, its not quite as useful as everyone is so green .. so people screen based on college / attempts at raw brainpower games with brain teaser puzzles and stuff.

On the more experienced end of the scale, I'm often surprised to see how many resumes with 3-5 years experience are basically Python-only. This, in the absence of something else in the resume that speaks to domain expertise or something.. its definitely a less exciting prospect to me.

The 2000s version of this were Java-only devs and people who acted as though we didn't need to know how the hardware worked anymore because Java abstracted it away. You see this attitude with some cloud/k8s type dev today.

In both situations, naively.. yes you don't need to understand much about the hardware for your basic implementations.

Arguably once you get into moderate levels of complexity you actually have higher cognitive overhead because you need to understand how the underlying hardware behaves and how the abstraction layers between you & it interplay..

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#334

Post by benrow »

Orochikaku wrote: post #146

Signals and Threads[0] is a podcast featuring interesting conversations from engineers at Jane Street [0] https://signalsandthreads.com/

Very interesting podcast - crazy stuff relating to the very edge of possibility in low latency computing.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#335

Post by wheelinsupial »

vecter wrote: post #54
julianeon wrote: post #32

Something I don’t understand: Why haven’t their gains been arbitraged away? Conceptually what they do seems simple enough; and presumably you just need capital to do it. Hell, their own former employees could theoretically compete against them - as could many traders who would pay to learn those strategies. So why are they still making so much? I don’t understand why their “advantage” hasn’t been arbitrated away into…

I worked in High Frequency Trading over a decade ago (not Jane Street) so I have some insight into this. In general, markets are always evolving. I've seen a team of four traders that make $500k/day go down to $0/day over the course of 6 months. So you're actually right more than you think. Plenty of teams that make money do stop making money over time (or make less). I'm sure there were teams at Jane Street over the…

> They probably ate most of the former team's lunch.

Are you able to elaborate on this?

I’m assuming that teams wouldn’t be sharing strategies with other teams. Is that accurate?

Would these other teams be independently finding some strategy that is either directly better than another internal team or is having some indirect impacts on other teams?

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#336

Post by JackFr »

mooreds wrote: post #314
FabHK wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that Flash Boys was below par, what's wrong with The Big Short? I thought that was well done, accessible, and largely accurate.

I liked The Big Short. On a different but related note, I also really enjoyed the Compleat Ubernerd, written by Tanta, all about mortgage servicing in the mid 2000s: https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2007/07/compleat-ubernerd... I'm not sure how it has aged (no Dodd-Frank updates, the author has passed away) but it was glorious in its time.

Tanta was the ABSOLUTE BEST writing on the financial crisis as it was happening. You've made it when Federal Reserve Bank of NY cites your blog in a footnote in their research report.

https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff...

The CR blog was not the same after she passed away.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#337

Post by SamReidHughes »

samatman wrote: post #288
dejerpha wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neutrinos don’t need to go around the earth, so in theory you have a pi/2 advantage over an EM signal when sending to an antipodal location, for instance. In practice of course, throughput is utterly horrible for the reason you indicate.

This assumes that neutrinos aren't slowed by a dense medium as light is. That's a maybe. Still, good point.

We already fire neutrino beams through the Earth's crust, and they travel at the speed of light, and the core isn't that much more dense.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#338

Post by rgifford »

vecter wrote: post #230
rgifford wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPUs operate due to quantified phenomenon. They're well understood. They've been refined over nearly 100 years. HFTs came into their own over the past decade or so -- during a time of falling interest rates, unprecedented growth, and notable lack of regulation in financial markets. One of these things is not like the other. I'd be entirely unsurprised to see most HFTs turn out like Lehman Brothers, Enron, or AIG. The…

HFT does nothing illegal. If you’re going to make strong claims like that, it would be good to provide some evidence.

A recounting of the recent history of US financial markets suggests, at least to me, that these firms have the burden of proof. If they haven't proven legitimacy and societal benefit, assuming fraud is a pretty safe bet. I honestly can't name any investment firm with double digit returns YoY for more than a decade or two that doesn't have bodies in the closet. Even Berkshire Hathaway pretty much tracks the S&P500 these days. And as for hand wavy platitudes about price discovery, I don't understand them in the least.

Occam's razor is all I'm saying: What's the simplest answer to the question, why aren't large HFTs with high overheads being eaten alive as technology decentralizes access to trading? Wouldn't we expect types like Burry -- self-driven, confident financial geniuses -- to be equally decentralized? Wouldn't we expect returns to become equally decentralized?

Fraud is the simplest answer. Maybe that comes in the form of market coercion, regulatory capture, negligence, or any other plain old market manipulation. Look back at Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. It's all much too similar for my tastes. Time will tell.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#339

Post by data_maan »

data_maan wrote: post #110
ChadNauseam wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What good has cancer research done to a person living in Madagascar?

So you've established: People in Madagascar don't get cancer.

It seems none of the people that posted here understood the intention of my comment: The parent comment by ChadNauseam implies that Madagascar citizens somehow would not benefit from cancer research (they would!), which could only be true if they don't get cancer. In my comment I pointed out this last end of this logical chain of conclusions to show how ridiculous the parents' post was.

Re: Understanding Jane Street

#340

Post by badpun »

benreesman wrote: post #170
badpun wrote: post #162

Curious how people are so interested in Jane Street, ostensibly because they do technically challenging work, but much less so about other places where the work is at least just as challenging, but the money sucks.

You're curious about how people would choose between two equally interesting jobs where one pays a lot more? I'm curious about how anyone could be curious about that.

I mean stuff is either interesting for someone or it's not. Money is not relevant to being interested by something.

I think people want to convince themselves that they're interested in high paying jobs such as those at Jane Street because that would make their lifes much easier (they could go work there and make lots of money). Similarly, some women try to convince themselves that they love this well-off, solid guy who's courting them - marrying such guy would make their lives much easier and nicer.

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