81–90 of 343 posts
> At the end of 2023, Jane Street employed 2631 people > About 80 per cent of the company's capital comes from employee equity, which has swelled to $21.3bn at the end of 2023 o.O
Are you telling me that one of American capitalism's peaks is basically a worker collective?
Where it goes wrong is when the regulator fails to stop foul play…
I love them because they keep the OCaml dream alive, but any company shouldn't have this kind of reach, especially in the realm of automation. This probably won't end well... Meanwhile I'd love to know what their edge is... It's probably more than OCaml, although... ;)
I think OCaml is more of symptom of the people who they hire. Most companies don't want to hire OCaml and Haskellers. They fear they would be too expensive, and requires clear thinking so you can't hire bottom of the bucket devs. If you want to hire the best and willing to pay that is no longer a concern
Most companies don't even know that these are programming languages. Also don't assume people interested in these languages are "the best". Regarding JS, this is all hearsay, but I think nowadays they hire good profiles (competitive programmers / olympiad winner / top graduates from prestigious schools), ask them hard leetcode questions, and teach them OCaml (which anybody can learn, not particularly hard. Their talent pool isn't restricted to the OCaml community, as it used to be when they were less famous, except for niche use case (compiler work and so on...)
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This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others. Maybe for a similar set of skills, JS doesn't pay (much) more than Meta or Google?
> This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. 900k is average including janitors and HR. Median for SWE most definitely over $1 million. Turnover of 6%? No way people stick around “only” making 500-600k new grad comp. Check levels.fyi > Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others And some high-level SWEs at JS make 9 figures, not 900k.
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Billion has wildly different meanings. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
Who knew? But that article indicates America has used the short scale (base ten) forever and the UK has used it since 1974, so let's just assume that FT (an English language paper) is not worried about confusion regarding the meaning of 'billion' and there's a different norm at work here.
The FT has a big international audience. As a German reader where a "Billion" is still 10^12 it does sometimes trip me up a little. So I at least find it useful.
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Its mostly done as a way to filter job applications into a smaller set. When Google was the 'hottest' job prospect (many years ago) they needed a way to reduce the set of applicants down to a number where hiring managers could handle the load. Setting criteria such as having an Ivy League degree or a CS degrees with GPA over 3.8 was a logical way to achieve this goal. That being said, if you went to a community colle…
> Setting criteria such as having an Ivy League degree or a CS degrees with GPA over 3.8 was a logical way to achieve this goal. It wasn't a "logical way", it was an "easy way". That's classist at the very least.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths [1] https://signalsandthreads.com/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/current-puzzle/
> We operate as a functionally-organized structure consisting of various management and risk committees. Each committee is responsible for directing the overall strategy of the firm and for emphasizing the importance of risk management to our operations. Each of our trading desks and business units is run by equity unit holders who take an active role in managing our day-to-day operations [...]. Our management structure allows for effective cross-departmental communication [...].
Yes, that org structure full of hierarchical business units with distinct responsibilities and committees and subcommittees and overseers and risk management totally screams "anarchy"...
I often discuss Jane Street as a great model of employee branding. They do well placed adverts/sponsorships (e.g. Standup Maths[0]), they produce a quite decent quality podcast (Signals and Threads [1]), and they have consistent monthly puzzles [2]. That level of investment in branding only makes sense, I think, at a large size. I'm kind of surprised they only have ~2500 people. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/stand…
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> This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. 900k is average including janitors and HR. Median for SWE most definitely over $1 million. Turnover of 6%? No way people stick around “only” making 500-600k new grad comp. Check levels.fyi > Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others And some high-level SWEs at JS make 9 figures, not 900k.
Some high level SWEs at Google are billionaires.
The entire tech industry has fewer billionaires than quant finance.
If you are ambitious, tech SWE is a bad deal.
They discriminate employment based on what school you go to, or at least they did circa 2013
B) if you have work experience, they filter on where you worked because the average google engineer / HFT engineer is probably better than your average engineer who works at missouri national bank.
C) if you've done something great that everyone knows about (like being the author of popular libraries, inventing tools that people use), then you can most likely bypass filters A and B if you can get in touch with a human recruiter (shouldn't be too hard).
For prestigious smaller companies which gets a lot of applicants, there is no easy way to reduce the pool without doing A and B. It is unfair and what college you go to might depend on circumstances beyond your control but if you have high ability regardless of what school you went to, you would eventually do B or C and get into the prestigious company.
If you don't have high ability and will never do either B or C, then they did the right thing filtering out your resume.
In the real world, it doesn't make sense for a company to discriminate against a candidate with higher ability just because they went to the wrong school (unless the company makes money from appearances like law firms, consulting firms or is corrupt and entrenched).