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What the interns have wrought, 2025

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#51

Post by MontyCarloHall »

smokel wrote: post #31
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Amongst the top 5% smartest quantitatively-minded kids I knew in college, I’d say ~25% of them ended up at quant shops like Jane Street, sometimes straight out of school, sometimes after doing a PhD. I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money.

They could spend their time playing chess, solving Fermat's last theorem, or invent space weapons. And why stop at humanity?

Perhaps with the exception of space weapons, none of those would pay Jane Street-tier salaries.

All I'm saying is that I wish our economic system were set up such that people with the mental aptitude to work at a place like Jane Street could earn commensurate salaries for applying that aptitude towards problems with much greater positive externalities than proprietary trading. Alas, it is not so.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#52

Post by infecto »

achierius wrote: post #48
infecto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we not make the same statement for most of the jobs people work here on HN?

Anyone who works in ad tech, sure. But plenty of people here do work on real products. Planes need software, browsers need security patches, hell even your accounting app is good value over the days of doing that all by hand.

Fair, but let’s be honest: even in your accounting app example, the “value” is ultimately in helping a business capture margin more efficiently. That business, in turn, is usually extracting value as a middleman somewhere else in the chain. Same with ad tech, finance, or even a lot of enterprise software, you’re greasing the gears of profit capture, not curing cancer.

That’s not a moral indictment, just a reminder that most of our jobs (mine included) exist to make capital move faster or stickier. Calling one sector “real products” and another “not benefiting society” is a bit of a convenient fiction.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#53

Post by strogonoff »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #33
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Amongst the top 5% smartest quantitatively-minded kids I knew in college, I’d say ~25% of them ended up at quant shops like Jane Street, sometimes straight out of school, sometimes after doing a PhD. I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money.

Thing is, there's very few problems that don't involve money or making money that can be solved with software. Even laudable projects like green energy are ultimately capitalist endeavours, since nobody will build solar panels etc for free.

There is a difference between 1) doing something valuable that is then rewarded with money through market mechanics and 2) maximizing money as an end in itself. The former is a great feature of capitalism, the latter is its tragedy and Achilles heel.

In the first case, money is important (if you completely ignore it, you can’t deliver value sustainably), but in a perfect world it should be more like fuel and an indicator that you are doing something right.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#54

Post by wyager »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #27
KHRZ wrote: post #2

I was curious what kind of company needed to develop all these different kinds of advanced tech. Turns out it's just so they can be sneaky and trade shares quickly. Kind of sad IMO.

Reality is far more sad. Companies like JaneStreet, 2Sigma, etc employ some of the best software engineers, mathematicians, physicists and what not just so they can - have better weather forecasts to identify whether a 1 degree delta in South CA can increase oil costs cents on the barrel, - run pandemic simulations to identify how the spread might happen and where inflation will rise so they move faster, - track occu…

I can construct even more compelling arguments for the uselessness or active harmfulness of most tech jobs.

The only "actually useful" tech jobs if we're going to consistently apply a bar that excludes finance would be stuff like aerospace R&D or ERM systems. Which, to be clear, I would love if society incentivized more strongly. But finance is hardly the worst offender here.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#55

Post by PartiallyTyped »

infecto wrote: post #37
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality is far more sad. Companies like JaneStreet, 2Sigma, etc employ some of the best software engineers, mathematicians, physicists and what not just so they can - have better weather forecasts to identify whether a 1 degree delta in South CA can increase oil costs cents on the barrel, - run pandemic simulations to identify how the spread might happen and where inflation will rise so they move faster, - track occu…

Could we not make the same statement for most of the jobs people work here on HN?

I can't say that about my job; I am providing tools for engineers to use and making things better. As part of my job I am expected to contribute to CPython, and rustc among other things.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#56

Post by alchemist1e9 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #51
smokel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could spend their time playing chess, solving Fermat's last theorem, or invent space weapons. And why stop at humanity?

Perhaps with the exception of space weapons, none of those would pay Jane Street-tier salaries. All I'm saying is that I wish our economic system were set up such that people with the mental aptitude to work at a place like Jane Street could earn commensurate salaries for applying that aptitude towards problems with much greater positive externalities than proprietary trading. Alas, it is not so.

It’s incorrect that proprietary trading has negative externalities. It’s also exhausting trying to explain that to an audience that has fundamental misconceptions about economics, financial systems, and monetary systems, so I don’t think I have the energy today. Hopefully someone else will and add to this thread.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#57

Post by [deleted] »

Shacklz wrote: post #17
doovd wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common rhetoric from someone who has no clue about financial markets (the person you replied to). Suppose you want to invest in S&p500 so you want to buy the ETF. Someone like Jane Street can create sell you this ETF, and take care of the risk that comes along with it. For example, the price they sell you this ETF should take into account the pricing of underlying stocks. While it sounds trivial, doing this pr…

> It's a common rhetoric from someone who has no clue about financial markets (the person you replied to). I think what OP meant is that producing all this fancy advanced tech just to play the financial game isn't all that much benefit for society. And when looking at societal development in the last couple of decades with the increasing gap in distribution of wealth, social mobility and overall life expectancy decli…

[deleted]

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#58

Post by infecto »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #55
infecto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we not make the same statement for most of the jobs people work here on HN?

I can't say that about my job; I am providing tools for engineers to use and making things better. As part of my job I am expected to contribute to CPython, and rustc among other things.

That’s great work, but even there you’re mostly building tools that make other engineers more efficient at building more tools. It’s not that the work lacks value it absolutely does, but it’s still part of the same recursive loop where the ultimate “benefit to society” gets pretty abstract. At the end of the chain, most of those tools are still helping businesses optimize, capture margin, or intermediate in some way.

It’s fine to take pride in craftsmanship, just maybe less fine to pretend it’s immune from the same critique applied elsewhere.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#59

Post by MontyCarloHall »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #56
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps with the exception of space weapons, none of those would pay Jane Street-tier salaries. All I'm saying is that I wish our economic system were set up such that people with the mental aptitude to work at a place like Jane Street could earn commensurate salaries for applying that aptitude towards problems with much greater positive externalities than proprietary trading. Alas, it is not so.

It’s incorrect that proprietary trading has negative externalities. It’s also exhausting trying to explain that to an audience that has fundamental misconceptions about economics, financial systems, and monetary systems, so I don’t think I have the energy today. Hopefully someone else will and add to this thread.

I never said it has negative externalities (whether it does or doesn't is a totally separate discussion), only that its positive externalities are certainly much less than some other fields that employ commensurately smart people, e.g. healthcare or climate change research.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2025

#60

Post by infecto »

achierius wrote: post #45
dude250711 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can only imagine what good that brainpower could do for humanity if it weren’t occupied finding cleverer ways to manipulate electronic money. Maybe humanity can start paying them decent money first?

You're right, we should fix our economic system so that it better incentivizes things we care about rather than stuff like quant research.

But what system should we use that fixes our economic system? This is not so much a defense of capitalism but asking what would be a better replacement. Capitalism in my opinion is the best solution so far that helps drive society forward when society is made up of all types of folks with different opinions and views of the world.
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