11 ms·

What the interns have wrought, 2018 edition

190 points by yminsky 8y ago

thomascgalvin 8y ago
> There is, as you can imagine, a lot of ground to cover. With 45 interns between our NY, London and Hong Kong offices, there were a lot of exciting projects. Wait, we're leaving the defense of our realm against mystical incursion to interns?
- senatorobama 8y ago
  I would watch that movie.
  - dayofthedaleks 8y ago
    You should consider Charles Stross' 'Laundry Files' series then!
    - lomnakkus 8y ago
      I can second that recommenadation.
- mondoshawan 8y ago
  Ever use Kerberos? >=)
  - stephengillie 8y ago
    That's 1 dog - they have 3 offices to defend.
    - wbl 8y ago
      Kerberos. Not your usual guard dog.
senatorobama 8y ago
Jane Street: for the amount of damage your CV will take for exclusively using this dead language at a job, the comp better be worth it.
- wuschel 8y ago
  Why is OCaml a 'dead language'?
  - AstralStorm 8y ago
    It didn't get intake needed to become popular plus it is not at cutting edge of research to qualify as a research language.
    - smt88 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure Facebook uses it extensively to build their languages. That fact alone means it's not dead and its popularity isn't that important.
      - AstralStorm 8y ago
        It is not quite being advertised widely plus a language that is not used by more than one major company, especially externally, tends to go away. Albeit it is Google who start then leave to die more languages than I can count on the fingers of one hand. OCaml is very far from dead though.
        wuschel 8y ago
        I saw these resources recently in the web - would anyone knowledgeable in the OCaml ecosystem care to comment on this? 1) https://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2017/slides__2017__anil-madhavapeddy__the-state-of-the-ocaml-platform-september-2017.pdf https://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2017/slides__2017__anil-mad... 2) https://www.infoq.com/presentations/ocaml-browser-iot/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/ocaml-browser-iot/ It seems that there is constant work on the tooling part of the language, and that multicore would be (on the far) horizon.
msangi 8y ago
Kudos to Jane Street for giving their inters what seems to be very interesting projects and for publicly acknowledging their work.
abalos 8y ago
It would be cool to start seeing more of this from other companies. Also, I wonder if anyone has done an extensive cost-benefit analysis of using OCaml instead of a more common language. It seems like the training and cost of always needing to build your own frameworks would be exceptionally high.
- rwmj 8y ago
  Why "exceptionally" high? The programmers you are hiring are (or should be!) bright, they learn new things fast, and OCaml is not very difficult to learn. At any software company you have to learn new things. Every company has its internal development stack and custom software, unless the company literally isn't a software company at all or is doing something so unoriginal and dull that you wouldn't want to work there.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    >>> and [any language] is not very difficult to learn. I'm all for training and learning, but pretending that anything can be picked up quickly and easily is just wrong, especially in a trading environment. Any typo or bug is going to cost millions of dollars, it's very hostile to newcomers. They will be struggling enough to learn about finance and the company.
    - rwmj 8y ago
      > Any typo or bug is going to cost millions of dollars Good job they're using a language and other techniques which ensure that bugs are caught early, often at compile time.
      - dmitriid 8y ago
        yeah... no. only certain tupes of bugs. a compiler can’t catch a bug if you calculate interest rates incorrectly, for example.
        8y ago
bmiller2 8y ago
What a shame. So many smart people and great engineers wasting talent on a socially useless and unproductive product.
- jxub 8y ago
  Care to expand? Their contributions seem pretty interesting and important to me, and improving the financial market is not a bullshit nor trivial task at all.
  - typon 8y ago
    Where did the parent say "bullshit" or "trivial"? They said its socially useless and unproductive, which seems roughly true to me
- zyang 8y ago
  OCaml is a ML language with many concepts directly translateable to what you would consider to be "hip" language. swift, reason, clojure. These interns are given technically meaningful work instead of pushing sql/json around. I would hire any of these interns in a heartbeat.
  - richeyryan 8y ago
    Small nitpick. Reason is Ocaml. They are exactly the same language. Just different syntaxes
- glup 8y ago
  In grad school it made me so sad to know brilliant undergrads with progressive political views go to work in corporate tech/finance afterwards because they perceived that was what everyone else does, and to afford their aspirational lifestyles. Edit: It's potentially productive if they open source some of their new stuff? I'm guessing the whole point is that the firm is developing its competitive edge.
  - genericid 8y ago
ilaksh 8y ago
Where the interns paid, at a market rate? This seems like legal documentation demonstrating that they were working on core development for the firm. So without fair pay, that is illegal is it not?
- oh_sigh 8y ago
  Of course they were fairly paid. Probably at least 80k/yr amortized for their work. At least that is how it happens at every other big tech company, and I'm sure if you can intern at jane street you can intern at amazon et al.
  - sadamznintern 8y ago
    > At least that is how it happens at every other big tech company, and I'm sure if you can intern at jane street you can intern at amazon et al. Nobody from Jane Street is ever going to work at Amazon, Jane Street is far, far, far, far, far more prestigious and impressive. Also, they make $10k a month or more. I'm pretty sure they think of Amazon the same way I think of software engineers at, say, MetLife or Allstate or even worse.
    - xapata 8y ago
      Stereotypes aren't as helpful as you seem to think.
      - sadamznintern 8y ago
        What do you mean?
        xapata 8y ago
        I've met smart people at dumb companies and dumb people at smart companies (and schools). The more experience I have working with the most respected people and organizations, the more evidence I discover that reputation is more corellated with happenstance than with merit.
sadamznintern 8y ago
What tech interns do at trading companies, especially JS, always amazes me. Not because of the complexity of the problem domain but rather the rigor of the solution. Something like Tristan Hume's famous blog post [0] on Tree Diffing would be unthinkable at Amazon, or most likely even Google or FB. If it's for internal use, they'd just slap together whatever works and looks nice, test the crap out of it and launch (part 2 optional). Nobody would want to spend weeks minimizing the white space like this, especially over 5 weeks. I know multiple people who have interned at Trading companies - all making more than $9k a month - working on optimizing React rendering for tables. They have solutions that are amazing and wonderful because they are superior engineers and computer scientists than mere mortals like me, but for the problem space it seems pretty ridiculous. I know people who have done crazy stuff that has gone into production during their Google, Facebook, or even lesser companies like Amazon internships but were compensated a fraction ($6k a month at Amazon vs. $10k a month at JS). I guess this is the dollar value difference of prestige. [0]: http://thume.ca/2017/06/17/tree-diffing/ http://thume.ca/2017/06/17/tree-diffing/
- lhnz 8y ago
  > I know multiple people who have interned at Trading companies > - all making more than $9k a month - working on > optimizing React rendering for tables. They have > solutions that are amazing and wonderful because > they are superior engineers and computer scientists > than mere mortals like me, but for the problem space > it seems pretty ridiculous. This is interesting to me. What companies are you referring to?
  - sadamznintern 8y ago
    I can't be too specific given how few of these there are (lol), but think on the level of Jane Street, Jump Trading, 2 Sigma and 5 Rings.
    - davidmr 8y ago
      I worked at one of the above and can confirm that the interns, particularly the R&D interns were producing truly excellent work at the forefront of their respective fields, particularly with the mentorship of the senior staff. I'm serving a 1 year non-compete at the moment, and the only thing I find myself actually missing is the internal colloquia for some of the in-house projects and research. It's very, very cool of Jane Street to publish some of these details. All the firms are doing approximately all of the same things tech-wise, so I think Jane Street might get a leg up on the next batch of recruits just for being willing to give them some public credit.

190 points by yminsky 8y ago

> There is, as you can imagine, a lot of ground to cover. With 45 interns between our NY, London and Hong Kong offices, there were a lot of exciting projects. Wait, we're leaving the defense of our realm against mystical incursion to interns?

senatorobama 8y ago
I would watch that movie.
- dayofthedaleks 8y ago
  You should consider Charles Stross' 'Laundry Files' series then!
  - lomnakkus 8y ago
    I can second that recommenadation.
mondoshawan 8y ago
Ever use Kerberos? >=)
- stephengillie 8y ago
  That's 1 dog - they have 3 offices to defend.
  - wbl 8y ago
    Kerberos. Not your usual guard dog.

senatorobama 8y ago

Jane Street: for the amount of damage your CV will take for exclusively using this dead language at a job, the comp better be worth it.

wuschel 8y ago
Why is OCaml a 'dead language'?
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  It didn't get intake needed to become popular plus it is not at cutting edge of research to qualify as a research language.
  - smt88 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure Facebook uses it extensively to build their languages. That fact alone means it's not dead and its popularity isn't that important.
    - AstralStorm 8y ago
      It is not quite being advertised widely plus a language that is not used by more than one major company, especially externally, tends to go away. Albeit it is Google who start then leave to die more languages than I can count on the fingers of one hand. OCaml is very far from dead though.
      - wuschel 8y ago
        I saw these resources recently in the web - would anyone knowledgeable in the OCaml ecosystem care to comment on this? 1) https://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2017/slides__2017__anil-madhavapeddy__the-state-of-the-ocaml-platform-september-2017.pdf https://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2017/slides__2017__anil-mad... 2) https://www.infoq.com/presentations/ocaml-browser-iot/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/ocaml-browser-iot/ It seems that there is constant work on the tooling part of the language, and that multicore would be (on the far) horizon.

msangi 8y ago

Kudos to Jane Street for giving their inters what seems to be very interesting projects and for publicly acknowledging their work.

abalos 8y ago

It would be cool to start seeing more of this from other companies. Also, I wonder if anyone has done an extensive cost-benefit analysis of using OCaml instead of a more common language. It seems like the training and cost of always needing to build your own frameworks would be exceptionally high.

rwmj 8y ago
Why "exceptionally" high? The programmers you are hiring are (or should be!) bright, they learn new things fast, and OCaml is not very difficult to learn. At any software company you have to learn new things. Every company has its internal development stack and custom software, unless the company literally isn't a software company at all or is doing something so unoriginal and dull that you wouldn't want to work there.
- user5994461 8y ago
  >>> and [any language] is not very difficult to learn. I'm all for training and learning, but pretending that anything can be picked up quickly and easily is just wrong, especially in a trading environment. Any typo or bug is going to cost millions of dollars, it's very hostile to newcomers. They will be struggling enough to learn about finance and the company.
  - rwmj 8y ago
    > Any typo or bug is going to cost millions of dollars Good job they're using a language and other techniques which ensure that bugs are caught early, often at compile time.
    - dmitriid 8y ago
      yeah... no. only certain tupes of bugs. a compiler can’t catch a bug if you calculate interest rates incorrectly, for example.
      - 8y ago

bmiller2 8y ago

What a shame. So many smart people and great engineers wasting talent on a socially useless and unproductive product.

jxub 8y ago
Care to expand? Their contributions seem pretty interesting and important to me, and improving the financial market is not a bullshit nor trivial task at all.
- typon 8y ago
  Where did the parent say "bullshit" or "trivial"? They said its socially useless and unproductive, which seems roughly true to me
zyang 8y ago
OCaml is a ML language with many concepts directly translateable to what you would consider to be "hip" language. swift, reason, clojure. These interns are given technically meaningful work instead of pushing sql/json around. I would hire any of these interns in a heartbeat.
- richeyryan 8y ago
  Small nitpick. Reason is Ocaml. They are exactly the same language. Just different syntaxes
glup 8y ago
In grad school it made me so sad to know brilliant undergrads with progressive political views go to work in corporate tech/finance afterwards because they perceived that was what everyone else does, and to afford their aspirational lifestyles. Edit: It's potentially productive if they open source some of their new stuff? I'm guessing the whole point is that the firm is developing its competitive edge.
- genericid 8y ago

ilaksh 8y ago

Where the interns paid, at a market rate? This seems like legal documentation demonstrating that they were working on core development for the firm. So without fair pay, that is illegal is it not?

oh_sigh 8y ago
Of course they were fairly paid. Probably at least 80k/yr amortized for their work. At least that is how it happens at every other big tech company, and I'm sure if you can intern at jane street you can intern at amazon et al.
- sadamznintern 8y ago
  > At least that is how it happens at every other big tech company, and I'm sure if you can intern at jane street you can intern at amazon et al. Nobody from Jane Street is ever going to work at Amazon, Jane Street is far, far, far, far, far more prestigious and impressive. Also, they make $10k a month or more. I'm pretty sure they think of Amazon the same way I think of software engineers at, say, MetLife or Allstate or even worse.
  - xapata 8y ago
    Stereotypes aren't as helpful as you seem to think.
    - sadamznintern 8y ago
      What do you mean?
      - xapata 8y ago
        I've met smart people at dumb companies and dumb people at smart companies (and schools). The more experience I have working with the most respected people and organizations, the more evidence I discover that reputation is more corellated with happenstance than with merit.

sadamznintern 8y ago

What tech interns do at trading companies, especially JS, always amazes me. Not because of the complexity of the problem domain but rather the rigor of the solution. Something like Tristan Hume's famous blog post [0] on Tree Diffing would be unthinkable at Amazon, or most likely even Google or FB. If it's for internal use, they'd just slap together whatever works and looks nice, test the crap out of it and launch (part 2 optional). Nobody would want to spend weeks minimizing the white space like this, especially over 5 weeks. I know multiple people who have interned at Trading companies - all making more than $9k a month - working on optimizing React rendering for tables. They have solutions that are amazing and wonderful because they are superior engineers and computer scientists than mere mortals like me, but for the problem space it seems pretty ridiculous. I know people who have done crazy stuff that has gone into production during their Google, Facebook, or even lesser companies like Amazon internships but were compensated a fraction ($6k a month at Amazon vs. $10k a month at JS). I guess this is the dollar value difference of prestige. [0]: http://thume.ca/2017/06/17/tree-diffing/ http://thume.ca/2017/06/17/tree-diffing/

lhnz 8y ago
> I know multiple people who have interned at Trading companies > - all making more than $9k a month - working on > optimizing React rendering for tables. They have > solutions that are amazing and wonderful because > they are superior engineers and computer scientists > than mere mortals like me, but for the problem space > it seems pretty ridiculous. This is interesting to me. What companies are you referring to?
- sadamznintern 8y ago
  I can't be too specific given how few of these there are (lol), but think on the level of Jane Street, Jump Trading, 2 Sigma and 5 Rings.
  - davidmr 8y ago
    I worked at one of the above and can confirm that the interns, particularly the R&D interns were producing truly excellent work at the forefront of their respective fields, particularly with the mentorship of the senior staff. I'm serving a 1 year non-compete at the moment, and the only thing I find myself actually missing is the internal colloquia for some of the in-house projects and research. It's very, very cool of Jane Street to publish some of these details. All the firms are doing approximately all of the same things tech-wise, so I think Jane Street might get a leg up on the next batch of recruits just for being willing to give them some public credit.