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What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#91

Post by rufus_foreman »

jkestner wrote: post #34
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.

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make money off the next financial crisis.

>> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make money off the next financial crisis

Better than burning cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, I guess.

-- https://poets.org/poem/howl-parts-i-ii

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#92

Post by nxobject »

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…

I agree with your example – and I believe that a lot of people's concerns are due to the fact that the way market dynamism leads to individual resilience and recovery, still necessarily involves individual instability and insecurity with root structural causes that are worth addressing.

As a contrived example: why is there a competitive market for efficient heat pumps, and a role for a "market lubricator" to profit like a logistics behemoth like Amazon, in formerly temperate climates? Climate instability and its human consequences. The good and the bad co-exist, and I'm not going to speculate any more than that.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#93

Post by filoleg »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #86
filoleg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are a bit delusional about what "google class of people" is, not even mentioning the delusions about the whole concept of those "classes of people" really existing on such a level. Out of bajillion googlers I personally know well outside of work, I know exactly one that knows a presidential candidate, and it has nothing to do with the school they went to (we both went to the same public college in the south). Tha…

> You are a bit delusional about what "google class of people" is, not even mentioning the delusions about the whole concept of those "classes of people" really existing on such a level How so? After several years at Amazon and several years of knowing people at other companies it’s apparent the ones at Amazon have a totally different standard of living - one without having Olympic medals (apparently Google publishes…

> I didn’t even ever meet a Harvard grad when I was at Amazon - it’s hard to not meet one at Google or Jane Street (more so the later of course).

I met two at Microsoft and none at Google. It mattered exactly zero to anyone. Do you, like, just ask everyone at work which college they went to? Because I don't know that info for most of my coworkers, and neither do I care. Pretty certain that most people I work with don't know where I went to school either. The only times I even remember it being brought up front and forward was when we hosted interns, because duh, they go to school somewhere and they mention it.

> one without having Olympic medals (apparently Google publishes a list of Googler-olympians)

I personally don't know a single googler-olympian or know of one. I am sure they exist, as well as that list you are talking about, but this is literally something that no one cares about. 99.99% (probably even more) of googlers are not olympians and probably dont even know what that actually means.

> famous friends or ski trips

Famous friends - you assume they made those "famous friends" from working at a tech company as a regular engineer? And what even counts as "famous"? As for ski trips, my friends working across a bunch of companies (including amazon and noname companies) do it all the time. They just don't see the need to expose it all to everyone who isn't their actual irl friend.

> I go on Twitter for 5 minutes and see a Yale grad with 15 mutual with Vivek

Bro. Having twitter mutuals is not the same as being friends with someone. Also, I am pretty sure that bragging about being friends with Vivek (if you were one) is how one gets ostracised in a lot of circles. For a lot of people in tech, admitting to supporting him would be a social semi-suicide.

> Ive been “lifting” for years with zero improvement [...]. I’ve been leetcoding for years with zero improvement.

Get a personal trainer for at least a little bit, so that they can pinpoint what you might be doing wrong and teach you proper form and advise on nutrition. Something is going wrong somewhere, unless you suffer from one of the extremely rare diseases (e.g., some thyroid ones) or you figured out how to break the laws of physics or defy all that is currently known about human body.

Get a tutor or someone to study with using leetcode. Just throwing time at "practicing" things is a waste of time. Practice has to be mindful, and focused on improving specific aspects. If you practice a piano piece, you don't just go from start to finish over and over. You break it into chunks, focus on the problematic ones, figure out why they are problematic, train yourself in those areas, get better, then glue it all together. Just running a piece from start to finish over and over is a waste of time. Having a teacher, at least at first, would net you massive benefits. It is a night and day in terms of trying to get all the basics right on your own vs. with someone who can save you the time and anquish by pinpointing how and where you can improve.

> What’s even the point of working hard if I’ve never gotten anything for it?

Working hard isn't enough, working smart is.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#94

Post by dchftcs »

nxobject wrote: post #92
dchftcs wrote: post #59

Earlier 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…

I agree with your example – and I believe that a lot of people's concerns are due to the fact that the way market dynamism leads to individual resilience and recovery, still necessarily involves individual instability and insecurity with root structural causes that are worth addressing. As a contrived example: why is there a competitive market for efficient heat pumps, and a role for a "market lubricator" to profit l…

I also agree it's kind of sad that the best minds are trying to squeeze 1bps of extra profit out of ETF trades or worse, trying to figure out why an option is implying SP500 should be trading half tenth of a cent higher. And I believe it's a deep structural issue with the misalignment of incentives of society, where individuals are not to be blamed but everyone is complicit.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#95

Post by laidoffamazon »

filoleg wrote: post #93
laidoffamazon wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are a bit delusional about what "google class of people" is, not even mentioning the delusions about the whole concept of those "classes of people" really existing on such a level How so? After several years at Amazon and several years of knowing people at other companies it’s apparent the ones at Amazon have a totally different standard of living - one without having Olympic medals (apparently Google publishes…

> I didn’t even ever meet a Harvard grad when I was at Amazon - it’s hard to not meet one at Google or Jane Street (more so the later of course). I met two at Microsoft and none at Google. It mattered exactly zero to anyone. Do you, like, just ask everyone at work which college they went to? Because I don't know that info for most of my coworkers, and neither do I care. Pretty certain that most people I work with don…

Mutuals with Vivek on Facebook, on his private account. Very different situation. It means you’re friends with someone worth $600 million that was making $1 million a year when he was 26 at a hedge fund nobody’s heard of.

I’ve considered a trainer but it doesn’t seem like it would be terribly effective if starving myself hasn’t worked. It really does kind of feel like I’m just a defective human if I’m so bad at everything.

Re: What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

#96

Post by shyish »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #87
asdfman123 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is one of the most prestigious tech employers in the world.

I really doubt anyone that gets an offer at Jane Street would agree with that sentiment. Nobody at elite schools agrees and they all think my class of people are lazy or pitiable failures of some kind (or at least so I assume).

I was one the interns featured in the article, and I would agree with that sentiment.

Many of my colleagues and fellow interns were skilled programmers, but very few—if any—inherently possessed something that you or I don't have. The intern class was primarily composed of individuals with a curiosity for technology and circumstances that enabled their exploration.

I recognize the ease of feeling dissatisfied with one's own achievements; I doubt that receiving an offer from Jane Street for you or gaining admission into a elite school for myself would quell our insecurities. You've accomplished a lot, though I don't know how to help you recognize that.

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