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What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#61

Jane Street discriminates based on what school you went to, during their hiring practices.

That's ok, some of the universities reject applications from PO Boxes or application fees paid with money orders. The filters work from a certain point of view, but I cannot help but wonder how much talent sits on the sidelines because nobody has time or the inclination to look.

Lots!

The statement that "talent is evenly distributed across the world, but opportunity is not" is very, very true.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#62
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software development is an outlier in that companies don't tend to care where you went to school. Lots of firms on Wall Street will only hire from a few schools, or sometimes even a single school. It makes sense Jane Street would be somewhere in between.

The rub is that their discrimination practices seem to care more about prestige over quality of CS programs. Sure, go ahead and use quality of school as a filter, but don't go around discriminating against top public schools while accommodating what are honestly fairly mediocre CS programs at certain Ivies / prestige-private-schools.

They don't discriminate against good public CS programs though? There are many interns from Berkeley for example. There also aren't that many SWE interns from e.g. Harvard - there are a lot of trading interns from HPY but that program recruits heavily from math departments, not just CS.

I'm not sure if people ITT are mixing up trading with engineering or projecting old Wall Street biases onto Jane Street, but it's just not true that they prioritize what school a SWE went to. I'm not claiming they pour recruiting resources into Mediocre U, but they don't automatically filter out any schools, and there aren't any schools that get an automatic interview either.

And most relevant here, any school bias that does exist is related much more to the CS department at that school than any kind of archaic prestige/exclusivity factor. Waterloo and CMU are among the most represented for SWEs there - very good schools but not exactly global brands.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#63
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good uni, no?

My understanding is that it's basically the Canadian Harvard. Is the reputation worse than I thought?

There’s no such differentiation in Canadian universities. There’s a few that are a bit better than others in some areas.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#64
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why exactly is that "discrimination" and not, you know, simple evaluation? Is every company that doesn't hire based on a random number generator discriminating?

if not in : skip_interview_entirely return False ...as opposed to give every person a fair chance based on merit.

That's not Jane Street's process at all. I know first hand people from schools you've never even heard of that got internship offers, and I also know first hand people from MIT that got resume screened out. I'm not going to claim that there is no school bias at all, I don't know the finer details - but it's definitely not explicit as you describe. There are a lot of comments all over the internet (including this thread) from people at non-target schools that were interviewed.

There are some trading companies that do seem to legitimately do that kind of filtering (Two Sigma's application has a drop down menu for school with like 10 options and then "Other", DE Shaw asks for your SAT score, etc.). So I can see where the idea came from, but it's not true of JS.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#65
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That they were paid for by an investment firm and then released as OS means _we_ siphoned value out of the financial system. If you think they are getting paid to generate OS projects you aren't thinking about this very hard.

Well, Jane Street paid them to do work they presumably wouldn’t otherwise have done, and that work appears to have made it into OS. So Jane Street’s profiting from this work is irrelevant, they paid for it and we have it.

"I stabbed this child but luckily during the surgery they needed to survive they found a malignant tumor so really I am benevolent and actually saved their life."

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#66
post #48
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine. Considering the business Jane Street engages in is highly competitive (maybe even the most competitive in the world), if their hiring practices cause them to have lower productivity, the market will force them to correct their practices or go out of business. In fact, historical evidence shows amply that the more competitive an industry, the less discrimination (of the sort that we talk about now, like o…

A classic rebuttal : https://danluu.com/tech-discrimination/

Thank you for pointing me to this -- apparently it's not so classic that I have read it already. ;-)

Since I assume you didn't write it, I won't go into a point-by-point rebuttal of the points raised in this piece, but in the interest of keeping up the debate I will mention a few things.

Like many who think along these lines, there is a base fallacy assumed here by the author, which is that absent discrimination, the distribution of tech workers will resemble the distribution of the larger population. Perhaps it is the classical liberal tradition (that "all men are created equal") that leads us to believe this, but there is no reason to believe that any slice of the population must reflect the broader whole, no matter the subject at hand. Over half of the players in the NFL are black and only 0.1% Asian, out of about 13% and 6% of the general population respectively. About four-fifths of all cab drivers in the US are male. Billions of people enjoy running around the world and many millions compete in it, but the Kalenjin of Kenya comprise a stupid number of those at the very top levels of distance running. It's entirely plausible that Chinese, Indians, and Vietnamese (as mentioned) enter the profession at higher rates and succeed at higher rates than other groups without involving a cabal that favors them over other groups, or indeed even personal biases for or against.

This isn't to say that personal biases don't exist and the numerous anecdotes of objectionable behavior encountered by individuals who don't fit the typical "tech bro" mold are invalid. But words like "discrimination" must be precisely defined, and I favor one where it means legal or policy-based exclusion or subjugation of certain groups, contrasted against personal biases ("racism" when it comes to ethnic groups, "sexism" in gender, etc.). When older folks get fewer callbacks from interviews or women are seen as girlfriends at tech conferences, that's personal biases at play, but it is not the same thing as being discriminated against. When you conflate the two you head down a dangerous path that we're treading as a society now, which is the tendency towards totalitarian control of people's thoughts; and this cost must be weighed against any benefit.

It's interesting that the author specifically mentions the Townsend-Greenspan firm vis-a-vis the gender pay gap among economists, because that was a very example of where capitalists motivated by profit took advantage of the fact that women were paid less for equal work, hired such women for slightly more than their competition while still getting the same output, thereby both raising women economists' wages and making out with a handsome profit. It's an argument for letting the market play out. (I do question why the firm dissolved when Greenspan was appointed Fed chairman, instead of continuing on with their more competitive labor.)

This is getting long, so I'll conclude by reiterating what I see as two very salient points from the essay: "The market is just humans. It's humans all the way down", and "We can fix this, if we stop assuming the market will fix it for us".

Yes, the market is humans all the way down. The beauty of free markets is that it leaves the decision-making to the individual humans involved, and not an enlightened group of elites who think they can fix it by meddling. History is littered with examples of people who thought they can "fix this" and ended up making it worse -- so much so that we have a saying about it.

If you're interested in exploring this angle more, I'd be happy to point you to a few works in the literature who have made the argument way more clearly than I ever could.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#67
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rub is that their discrimination practices seem to care more about prestige over quality of CS programs. Sure, go ahead and use quality of school as a filter, but don't go around discriminating against top public schools while accommodating what are honestly fairly mediocre CS programs at certain Ivies / prestige-private-schools.

They are not discriminating by quality of CS program. They are using exclusivity of a school as a proxy for some combination of potential and pedigree.

“Pedigree”

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if not in : skip_interview_entirely return False ...as opposed to give every person a fair chance based on merit.

That's not Jane Street's process at all. I know first hand people from schools you've never even heard of that got internship offers, and I also know first hand people from MIT that got resume screened out. I'm not going to claim that there is no school bias at all, I don't know the finer details - but it's definitely not explicit as you describe. There are a lot of comments all over the internet (including this thre…

I have proof otherwise that can probably be replicated if need be. I can DM you the details. Granted this was a few years ago so hopefully they've matured since then.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

#70

Jane Street discriminates based on what school you went to, during their hiring practices.

Why? That seems like a dumb way cutting of potentially very talented candidates. Seriously it removes over 90% of candidates, if not more. That seems unsound.

Jane Street gets a shit ton of applicants. Every slightly ambitious college grad applies there. Same for experienced roles, it's full of FAANG folks hoping to get in.
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