Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've basically gotten nothing for my hustle lol (except a state school degree and working at Amazon, but I don't think that's considered "accomplished" to these types of people).
What about a large percentage of the world born into poverty and barely making a living? I'm sure a lot of people will take a state school degree and think working a job at amazon is pretty awesome or you can compare yourself to newton and feel like an absolute nobody (even if you are a great scientist in your own right). Point is, there are always people to compare yourself to to feel bad, it is never ending.
What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I worked at JS, and there's plenty of ways you're probably "superior" to me. Also, ~almost everyone I worked with at JS was brilliant and I don't say this to disparage anyone, even as engineers there were definitely blindspots. Also also: please remember that SBF worked there too.
> and there's plenty of ways you're probably "superior" to me. I guarantee you there is probably none, lol. I can't play an instrument, I can't lift, I can't run a marathon, haven't written a book, don't know a Presidential candidate - those are all normal things for the Jane Street that came from HYPSM or even the Google class of people, but extremely out of reach for people like me.
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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is always someone with something, for example talent or opportunity, that you don’t have or can’t have. I guess I was lucky to come to terms with “life’s no fair” at a young age. That doesn’t mean I’m defeatist, I’m a very driven person, but it does allow me to be more realistic without becoming demotivated.
I think that's easier to say if you have a good sense of your own positives, but I don't think I have any.
I'm commenting because I could have (and, in fact, have) said this. There's a hole in your heart that is preventing you from accurately self-evaluating. You are not seeing the whole picture because you're in the middle of it. Go see a good therapist. Consider ketamine infusions if you have the money.
I can promise you this: you'll never hate yourself into positive self-worth, the same way you'll never fill a bucket by drilling a hole in the side.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#64Maybe I'm doing something wrong if the interns here are clearly 4x as skilled as I am lol
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make money off the next financial crisis.
One way to look at is that the more people who can figure out how to make money in a crisis without adding to said crisis, the less severe the crisis becomes. If someone can price distressed corporate bonds better, they will bid higher, and bagholders of companies that actually have decent prospects (but are hurt by market anomalies in crisis situations) can then lose less money, compared to the alternative. As an an…
"To be clear, I do think finance & law are important, but too many smart people in the US go into those fields. Also, too many MBAs." - Elon Musk
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#66Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
Be nice to yourself and challenge that thought of inferiority.
"Good enough for Jane Street" often means (much more than) having middle-class parents, decent upbringing, right tutor at the right time. I know people that are not "good enough" because they were never taught how to play the game right, who don't have parents polishing their resumes for them. Of course it still involves hard work and grit, but luck and the birth lottery plays a big role. Privilege wins in this world.
Besides, do well in big tech, use that as a stepping stone to trading firms is quite a viable path I heard.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#67Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.
I can recommend the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, maybe you can benefit from it. It definitely helped me work through feelings like this.
> being objectively inferior, in basically every way
Maybe one reason that you feel like there is a big issue to deal with, is the way you're framing this. In your framing, the scope of your conclusion goes quite a bit beyond what you can actually logically deduce from the available information.
If we look at the facts, we have 152 interns who had resume and interview skills that were objectively more suited to landing an internship at Jane Street than your resume and interview skills are (presumably - it doesn't sound like you've tried, so we're not actually sure). These people have probably been preparing for this for a while, and while there is a degree of objectivity to the way Jane Street looks at incoming profiles, it's along very specific axes (probability of success in their fintech firm), and it's not perfectly objective. You're massively overstating the scope of this, they don't measure superiority/inferiority along all possible axes.
Then you might counter - no, it's not only about resume and interview skills: clearly the 3 projects described on this page are beyond what I could do as an intern, and maybe even beyond what I can do after a few years of working experience. That would be a fair point - but note that these are 3 out of 152 projects, selected to impress and inspire outsiders, and you don't know how much guidance these interns got from more experienced folks while working on this either. On top of that, many of these interns may have been actively programming since they're 10, so effectively they might have double the programming experience you have - in which case their results make perfect sense, and you just need more time to polish your skills. So extrapolating what you see here to the full set of projects and drawing far reaching conclusions about the interns based on this small sample is probably not justified.
I'm sure that these Jane Street folks are generally very good at what they do and that it would be inspiring to see them work. But I think you can give yourself more credit and spend a little bit of effort focusing on things that you're good at that aren't measured in Jane Street interviews, because it's likely that on those axes you'd generally compare favorably to most of the cohort.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of people get into places like Jane Street because they hustle and aren't necessarily any smarter than you. Sometimes feelings of inferiority like this are just a backdoor way to avoid having to put in that work.
I've basically gotten nothing for my hustle lol (except a state school degree and working at Amazon, but I don't think that's considered "accomplished" to these types of people).
Amazon is one of the most prestigious tech employers in the world.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#69I always love these posts. Great job to the interns. Building a tokenizer with a handcrafted automaton instead of a regex sounds like a cool project. And I found it interesting that Jane Street has a frontend for interacting with different AI services and LLMs. I'm curious how that's used. But to be honest, what surprised me most about that was that Jane Street cares about counting the token usage in its API calls. I…
>They have billions of dollars, so it struck me as odd to see such concern for efficiency You have it the wrong way around, it's because of that concern that they have billions of dollars. Obsessively making things a tiny bit more efficient is their business. Works both for software and for markets
Reminds me of the millionaire next door.
Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
One way to look at is that the more people who can figure out how to make money in a crisis without adding to said crisis, the less severe the crisis becomes. If someone can price distressed corporate bonds better, they will bid higher, and bagholders of companies that actually have decent prospects (but are hurt by market anomalies in crisis situations) can then lose less money, compared to the alternative. As an an…
"To be clear, I do think finance & law are important, but too many smart people in the US go into those fields. Also, too many MBAs." - Elon Musk
He can lead by treating his technology employees better...