Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

blog.janestreet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 96 posts

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#71

Post by frontman1988 »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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.

Nah I just pretend to pity them for working at a soul sucking job when with their 'superior' minds they could have been solving some real problems humanity faces.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#72

Post by jkestner »

dchftcs wrote: post #59
jkestner wrote: post #34

Earlier 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…

Admittedly, the only thing I know about Jane Street is that the FTX sociopaths cut their teeth there, but I'm sure the rest of them are great.

You're right that market bending is too abstract for most of us to appreciate the benefits, but markets abstract away the humans, too. I don't pretend that the industry ever knows when to stop making markets efficient and ask for regulation because they're making paperclips out of all of our savings. Whatever benefit they produce should be a tool wielded by boring technocrats.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#73

Post by vgatherps »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #46
hotnfresh wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN often confuses $300k for low-end-of-normal for early-career US software devs in general, when it’s above most seniors and leads at most employers. You don’t hit that territory until you’re a manager-of-tech-managers, outside the smallish third hump of the trimodal dev compensation graph. My pay’s almost 3x median household income in my medium-sized US city, but is pathetic compared to what I see thrown around regu…

Yeah, $300k isn't considered great for my level of tenure, but it is less than what Jane Street/Jump/HRT new grads make.

The major hft firms do pay well but new grad pay is often inflated in a few ways - signing bonus is included in “total” as if it’s recurring, first-year guarantees/targets are treated as recurring total, “this pays out over 4 years” is lumped into single-year recurring total, and you only hear about the biggest and best online.

2020-2022 high tech sector pay and huge profitability brought by the return of volatility also saw much higher base/bonus pay across the board, but the market really cooled down towards the end of 2022 longwise all the tech layoffs and HFT firm over hiring. I watched a few eye watering open offers fade away towards year end myself.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#74

Post by vgatherps »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #48
wk_end wrote: post #28

Earlier 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.

I know plenty of Jane Street (and other “prestigious” quant firm people). They’re generally smart, admittedly tend towards overachievers, and are otherwise relatively normal people. They’re not a class of god tier humans sitting above everyone else.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#75

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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.

At one point in my life I was motivated in a special way, worked really hard, and got to be 99.9 percentile in a quantitative test. Now I’m just a decent coder and wouldn’t stand a chance at a Jane street interview. In my opinion, aptitude is necessary, but people who can pass those interviews are differentiated by a bunch of experience and focus, mental scaffolding that takes years to build. It looks like magic from outside, but it isn’t.

My point is you shouldn’t feel inferior, you’ve just been doing different things with your brain. What’s so great about trading anyway? It’s not a particularly efficient allocation of brainpower to society.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#76

Post by user_named »

mtillman wrote: post #42
chatmasta wrote: post #4

I 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…

API costs are margin in trading and margin is everything. If you don’t have a way of managing that margin, you’re not a real trading firm. Pairing this type of execution with HFT would be their long term goal and that requires lots of feedback done in microseconds.

Different type of margin.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#77

Post by nvm0n2 »

chatmasta wrote: post #4

I 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…

I thought the more interesting thing was that they're spending time writing custom tokenizers, regex automatons and logging frameworks at all, just so it can be in OCaml.

For the tokenizer they had three more obvious options:

1. Use a JavaScript lib and call it via FFI. Tokenization isn't a hard task.

2. Compile tiktoken to WASM and call it directly.

3. Stick with their Python server.

Writing a custom regex automaton in OCaml and then running it in the browser is surely the worst option. How does this make sense, outside of just arbitrarily writing more OCaml for the sake of it? The justification for not using their previous scheme is only that it's "grungy", without further explanation.

Every other project also seems to be like this. The justification for it boils down to nobody else using OCaml, so they need an intern army to reinvent all the wheels they're missing.

I mean, I'm sure the interns had fun and were paid well. But there's a post below by someone with a massive inferiority complex, stating that everyone is "objectively inferior" to the people at Jane Street. This post doesn't make me feel inferior, it makes me feel a sense of awe and wonder that Jane Street's traders are so profitable they can subsidise this kind of objectively excessive IT bloat. Even the author seems to recognize this, it says the post is by the guy who has "the dubious honor of having convinced the firm to start using OCaml".

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#78

Post by RugnirViking »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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.

> as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.

try it I dare you. Whats the worst that could happen? Ask for feedback, be confident and open.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#79

Post by euroderf »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #20
GolDDranks wrote: post #13

TIL: "wrought" means about the same as "worked", but it has a more "tangible" sense to it, like doing some smithery/forgery.

I had years of germanic linguistics in undergrad and grad school, and i think this is an alternate ("archaic") past tense of work, so it's literally "worked", just like you said a blacksmith would do. i mention the germanic classes because i can't at the moment think of other examples where (outside arabic etc) there's a commutativity between a consonant and vowel (work & wrokt) but i'd swear i would think of some if…

Isn't it a form of "wreak" ?

Another odd one is "fraught".

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#80

Post by up2isomorphism »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #2

Great 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.

It is a query language, an impressive piece of work, but not something extraordinary.
Post reply on HN