11 ms·

For those who don't know, Jane Street is one of the best performing algorithmic trading firms on Wall Street. Probably the largest Ocaml shop on earth. It's a

by davidu 6y ago

For those who don't know, Jane Street is one of the best performing algorithmic trading firms on Wall Street. Probably the largest Ocaml shop on earth. It's a lucrative job for strong programming talent. Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year (edit: after a few years). They are similar to Two Sigma in tech focus and talent, which is a more well-known firm.

polote 6y ago
> Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year. Do you have a source for such claim ? data from h1b salary [1] tells that senior software make 200k base, and here [2] they explain that the average salary is 440k [1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=JANE%20STREET&job= https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=JANE%20STREET&job= [2] https://news.efinancialcareers.com/fr-en/307393/jane-street-pay https://news.efinancialcareers.com/fr-en/307393/jane-street-...
- TylerE 6y ago
  Wall Street jobs are very very performance bonus driven. Not unusual for bonuses to be 5x or more salary in a good year.
  - maest 6y ago
    It's rarely the case that Technology sees those kinds of bonuses; that's most common on the Investment side. And yes, even places like Jane Street separate between Investement and Tech.
    - davidu 6y ago
      The investment side is engineering. If you're talking about IT that makes the printer work, sure.
      - maest 6y ago
        I cannot speak for Jane Street, in particular, but I have spent many years working at a very similar firm, and Investment is not Technology. There are engineers working in Investment, yes, but the risk profiles, the payout profiles and the focus of their work is very different. Investment deals with getting and analysing data, understanding the market and their algos, coming up with trading ideas, handling their PB relationships, doing the actual trading (e.g. portfolio optim, factor hedging, worrying about financing and borrow costs) etc. Technology deals with all things infra and (in most places) ingesting data and making it easily available internally. In particular, I would be surprised if the interns in this article were on the Investment side - a fund would rarley publish anything remotely resembling research. In fact: "Yulan ended up working with both the trading desk that was running this process, as well as the research group, which pointed her at some cleaner cost functions to optimize, as well as encouraging her to try out simulated annealing in addition to the greedy algorithm she started with." The "research group" and the "trading desk" are Investment.
        davidu 6y ago
        It's too hard to fully explain how wrong this is, so just leaving the comment in case someone else reads it and thinks it might be right. The investors are engineers. Full stop. They write code. The code makes trades. Everything else is noise to support the engineers writing code to make trades.
        logicslave 6y ago
        You can tell someone worked on the old wallstreet when they jump to explain that engineers are not a part of the core finance business. I've seen this trope a million times, and it used to be true. In 2020, the hedge funds making the most money are the ones treating their technology people like they treat their investment people. They interact, receive similar (though not 2M+) pay, and the programmer often has a part in analyzing the data and building the libraries to push the research forwards.
        maest 6y ago
        You're basing your assumptions on very little information. In particular, my position was with a buy-side fund set up in the last 5-10 years. It was definitely not "old wallstreet".
    - fractionalhare 6y ago
      In HFT (and often stat arb) the front and back office dichotomy doesn't apply as much. Basically anyone doing nontrivial engineering work has an opportunity to share in the profits of the firm at Jane Street. They don't need to be a quantitative researcher or trader.
      - twic 6y ago
        Are you stating this from specific knowledge of Jane Street? The division in trading firms, IMLE, is between front office (making and executing trading decisions) and back office (book-keeping, accounting, risk control, compliance, administration, etc). Both sides have technical and financial people. But only front office - both technical and financial - is likely to get wild bonuses from doing good trades. Back office bonuses are more about doing the job well. If Jane Street is sharing some of the trading profit with back office staff, good on them.
        fractionalhare 6y ago
        I am, yes. I'm more familiar with their researchers, but I know (or have spoken to) people across different functions there. They have security engineers who earn over $1M/year (for one example of something which isn't usually "front office"). For Jane Street it's about impact: if you substantially improve something at the firm, you share in the spoils. That doesn't mean literally everyone who works there is rich, and the quants will do better relatively speaking. But in the sense of engineers being second class citizens: no, I wouldn't say that's the case at all.
        whatok 6y ago
        Most buyside joints don't have anything resembling a security engineer. If they actually need one, it's closer to a front office role than not. You also don't want some random jabroni in charge of something mission critical like that.
      - IshKebab 6y ago
        That isn't the case at the few London HFT companies I've applied to. They had a clear division between quants and everyone else.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    "Wall Street" is such a broad term. Places like Jane Street and their like obviously pay technology employees very well. But they represent an absolutely tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the pie. The vast majority of SWEs employed in Wall Street work for various firms big and small that you'd be fairly lucky to break 200k-250k TC decades into your career. No, 200k isn't a small income, but odds are you could match that number at any number of middle tier tech companies, earlier in your career, while enjoying a much better work environment and various other perks. And of course upper-middle to top tier tech companies (culminating in FAANG) can offer multiples of that amount - and again, probably with much better working environments and other perks. Your odds of making it into FAANG or similar caliber tech company are probably much higher than your odds of making it into a Jane Street caliber financial firm.
- european321 6y ago
  In finance the money is in the bonuses, which on a good year can easily exceed the base.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- davidu 6y ago
  I know people who work there. That comp data excludes bonuses -- and most importantly -- that employees are able to invest in the proprietary funds themselves, which generate insane returns.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Another thing the HN orthodoxy rejects is that professional investing and trading can make money above monkey-dart levels, despite the abundance of evidence that it does.
    - runamok 6y ago
      It's not just HN. It's generally accepted that over 20 year spans almost no actively managed fund beats index funds. Example PDF showing this: https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2016.pdf https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2...
    - closeparen 6y ago
      This assertion is about funds that are open to the general public. No one doubts e.g. Renaissance’s Medallion fund.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        OK but it's still just false. Go read this obituary of Richard Gilder who recently passed away. He founded a firm that gave ordinary retail investors consistently high returns for decades. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/richard-gilder https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/richard-gilder
        graeme 6y ago
        The super investors of graham doddsville is also instructive reading on this point.
        Aunche 6y ago
        I'm sure that some hedge funds know what they're doing, but it's impossible to tell which are the good ones. Investing in a hedge fund still is functionally equivalent to asking a monkey to throw darts at stocks.
- ilarum 6y ago
  I have read in forums that companies under-report salaries to the H1B database. They only need to report some number above the prevailing labor market and don't need to report the actual salary employees are paid over this.
  - kyawzazaw 6y ago
    I think it’s the base salary that is being reported.
- toiletfuneral 6y ago
  Curious, what actual value do they contribute to society?
- tossingcomp 6y ago
  Anecdata, but I totally believe this. FWIW, I get inbound recruiting from FAANG as well as some prestige finance companies. I'm a generalist with no degree but ~8 years of experience. I make ~$300k/year in NY. Given grapevine comp chatter, I'm sure that pre-Covid I was leaving money on the table versus what I'd earn if I prepped and left for FB or Google. I'm super happy with my employment situation though, so I've just been enjoying life. Partially to leave the door open and partially just to see how folks reacted, rather than giving a blanket "no thanks" to recruiters I got into the habit of replying to fancy recruiters with "I absolutely love my job and am not looking to leave. <all the things I love about it>, I wouldn't consider leaving for less than $600k/year unless a new role offered <one of several non-monetary things I really care about>." It may seem silly, but with luck, good timing and not using current comp as an anchor I've doubled up previously. My philosophy is that it never hurts to ask for more than you think you deserve, especially if you don't act like you're entitled to it. This was mostly met with "glad it's going so well there" and I can only assume snorts of derision. Meanwhile, the dude from fancy "headhunting" firm comes back with: "Excellent! With your profile, I can get you at least $700k with one of my buy-side client firms." Feel free to decide for yourself how much weight to give the anecdote. Maybe that # has a real basis for someone with (at the time) 5-6 years of experience. Maybe he assumed I must be making something near it already. Maybe he was saying anything to get his foot in the door. Or, maybe he decided I was jerking his chain and decided to have some fun of his own. He certainly made an impression.
  - wuschel 6y ago
    I am impressed. Would you perhaps consider a chat/call? Would really love to hear what you are working on, and what skills you developed. My contact details are in my profile. Cheers!
  - cvhashim 6y ago
    As a generalist, why don’t you get into software consulting and just set/bill your own rates. You can bill at 400/hr and earn north of 700k.
azhenley 6y ago
That is incredible. Do you know of any [non-corporate] blogs from their engineers? I'd love to learn more about them from an unofficial perspective.
- davidu 6y ago
  No, but they have a lot of technical content on their corporate blog. They recruit from all the topcoder kind of competitions for those interested in meeting people who work there.
- Tinyyy 6y ago
  I wrote a single blog post before I started working. https://tianyi.io/post/chicago1/ https://tianyi.io/post/chicago1/
fractionalhare 6y ago
"Routinely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I can confirm it's possible, as I've been in the industry and have spoken to people who make seven figures at Jane Street. But I would rather say it's "reasonably attainable" for an engineer who has been there for at least five - seven years and is really hitting their stride with the type of work. They do routinely beat out top tech compensation, and most engineers there are doing quite well - in the mid - high six figures. This is still saying a lot, since it's not really reasonably attainable for someone to hit seven figures per year even in FAANG - that would require an exceptional package at L7/E7, a good package at L8/E8, or very lucky timing and significant stock growth at L6/E6. Most engineers will never reach those levels. There is a caveat to mention: keep in mind that compensation at these firms exhibits survivorship bias. A new grad engineer at Jane Street will receive around $300 - 400k all in first year compensation: around $150k base, $150k guaranteed end year bonus and $100k sign on bonus. From there, what typically happens is further recalibration a year later. Either you're good enough to maintain at least that level of comp, and you stay, or you're out within a year or two. This means that you may not get an initial pay raise by joining, if you're extended an offer. Engineering offers from top trading firms are often an initial paycut, or an equivalent package, for anyone who is senior or higher at a place like Google and Facebook. You don't generally get to really significant compensation beyond tech until you're a few years in, and implicit in that assumption is that you'll actually stay there. So let's say you're a new grad with offers from Jane Street, Citadel, Google and Facebook. You'll probably get $400k from Jane Street and Citadel and $200k from Google and Facebook, including sign on bonuses. If you join one of the trading firms right out of school, you'll develop an affinity for the work faster (if you're good enough to stay), and you can reasonably expect to make up to $1M/year by the time you're 30. But now let's say you're L6/E6 at Google/Facebook. Maybe you're 30 and have $500k total compensation per year. Jane Street isn't going to offer you significantly more than half a million a year just because of your level in tech, unless they have a really pressing need and you're an industry expert. You will probably receive about the same package, with the possibility of making significantly more after developing more experience with their tech stack and work, after a year or two. The "shock and awe" competitive packages are given to new grads who can be developed from day one, but senior hires require further calibration. There is a ceiling on what trading firms are willing to offer people who have exceptional promise but otherwise no domain experience in finance. In any case the people I know at Jane Street are consistently exceptional. I highly recommend the firm if you're interested in their work. Likewise Hudson River Trading has a very similar profile but is smaller and has more of a startup feel to it.
freewilly1040 6y ago
Do they have any plans to go fully remote? I see job postings which still reference specific cities.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jarsin 6y ago
How does a normal software developer go about getting in? Do they give the traditional google interview or worse?
- wk_end 6y ago
  I don't know about "worse", but unless things have changed in the past few years, yes, I'd say it's a "traditional" interview ("code up a rough solution to this algorithmic problem on a whiteboard/laptop"), and yes, I'd say it's harder - they're widely considered to be some of the hardest interviews in the industry, and personal anecdote for confirmation: about five years ago I interviewed at Jane Street and Google on subsequent days. The Jane Street interview was one of the most exhausting batteries of my life; by comparison the Google one was a cakewalk.
- giantg2 6y ago
  I hate to break it to you, but if you're a normal developer like me (you're probably better), then you aren't getting in. There was a recent post on HN about how to be ok with not being a 10x dev or something like that. There's some good stuff in there.
  - ibn-python 6y ago
    Can you link to that discussion?
    - giantg2 6y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261826
- nilkn 6y ago
  I interviewed for an internship as a quantitative researcher at Jane Street in college, and I can confirm it was the most technically difficult interview I went through -- certainly more difficult than Google.
- pb7 6y ago
non-entity 6y ago
Jesus Christ. I can't even imagine making that much annually off wage labor. I must have chose the wrong life path.
- giantg2 6y ago
  Me too, friend, me too. Some of these quoted compensations are more than I've made over my 8 year career.
  - fishingisfun 6y ago
    .... i know man. feels bad. but i guess not as bad if i had wasted time with further education in a low income major
    - giantg2 6y ago
      Very true. Now if only my wife would let us move to a lower cost area, then I might be able to retire from my soul sucking job a lot earlier...
- throwawydedbee 6y ago
  Maybe. I grossed around $300K at a JS competitor, but quit after a few years. These can be unpleasant places to work. High concentration of jerks. Highly secretive, which means it can be hard to find useful things to do. And they're rolling in dough, which means that there's very little motivation to do things right or care about retention. On top of that, cost-of-living in NY is very high, taxes on high salaries are very high, and it makes you a target (e.g., divorce, lawsuits, etc.). And as a final cherry, you'd be using OCaml all day, which while interesting, is a language you'll never see again in your career. I wouldn't beat myself up about it.
hvs 6y ago
I think Jane Street is single-handedly keeping OCaml a production-level language (which is a good thing, because it's a great mix of functional programming with a practical/pragmatic approach). If you haven't tried OCaml (or F# which is based on it), I highly recommend it.
- 52-6F-62 6y ago
  How do you think it would go learning "backwards" from Elixir (which I'm currently learning w/ Phoenix for another purpose)? I've glimpsed through Reason/Bucklescript but never spent real time in them.
  - hvs 6y ago
    I'm not familiar with Elixir, so I can't speak to that. But I would say that once you are familiar with functional programming, the choice of language comes down to what stack your company already uses, library support, and problem area. For instance, I would love to use OCaml, but we are primarily a dotnet house, so I use F# when I can. For Spark stuff, I use Scala. I'm not a language zealot, I prefer to use functional languages, and encourage their use when I can, but I use the best tool for the job within the constraints of the environment I'm working in. Not sure that's helpful, but I would just say if you are using Elixir you're probably already in a good place development-wise.
- Scarbutt 6y ago
  Is there any reason learn OCaml over F# for a new project?
  - hvs 6y ago
    I would look at what libraries you need. If you're a Microsoft house, I would go with F#. If performance is the highest priority, I would go with OCaml.
  - claydavisss 6y ago
    To turn this around a bit, I don't think dispensing with F# is that difficult. Practically everything interesting comes from the .Net SDKs and as a result, any nontrivial F# code will be sprinkled with C#-style API calls etc. I expected a friendlier Haskell but then realized it was more like a Typescript for C#.
dom96 6y ago
I don't know about anyone else but I have a negative perception of tech companies in the financial sector. Perhaps my perception is wrong, so I'm curious, how does the culture compare to one at Google or Facebook?
- wk_end 6y ago
  You can't really compare JS to Google or Facebook. It's still a company of < 1000 people, I think. I've never worked at a FAANG, though I've worked at companies only ~1 order of magnitude smaller. Any of these might have changed in the last few years since I left. * Very flat hierarchy and very limited bureaucracy. At JS there's like at most two people between you and the folks who run the place. * JS is technically isolated. They're not really part of the same conversation as the web-focused and much more public tech giants are. Lots of NIH, custom hand-rolled solutions. Maybe part of that is a consequence of going all-in on an ecosystem (Ocaml) that basically only you use and run, maybe part of that is that really smart people love to invent their own better solutions to problems, maybe part of that is that most of what JS does is either, like, command-line/TUI apps for traders to interact with or trading systems where a proprietary technical advantage is where you get your edge. * There's a particular Jane Street "way of thinking". Another comment on this thread exemplifies it pretty well [1] - technocratic and rationalist. If you don't fit into that mould you'll feel out of place, if you can even get hired at all. * More of a 9-6, butt-in-chair mentality than at other tech jobs I've worked. There's some flexibility about the 9-6 thing (and 9-6 can be pretty optimistic at times), but they're limited by the nature of the markets. At the time and for me, anyway, there was zero possibility of ever doing any work at home. COVID may have changed this. * There's still things clubs, office events, and perks, but to a lesser degree and more informally than at larger companies. It feels more like working a regular job at a real business. JS is also a lot smaller and more homogenous (see above), so less of that is needed to create social cohesion. If you have specific questions, or can elaborate on what your "negative perception" entails, I can probably comment further. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273348
  - dom96 6y ago
    > More of a 9-6, butt-in-chair mentality than at other tech jobs I've worked. There's some flexibility about the 9-6 thing (and 9-6 can be pretty optimistic at times), but they're limited by the nature of the markets. At the time and for me, anyway, there was zero possibility of ever doing any work at home. COVID may have changed this. This sort of thing precisely. My perception of these companies is that they are not as understanding about work-life balance, PTO, working from home, and ultimately trusting you to be independent. There is also a more corporate image that these companies have in my eyes, one thing that would likely exemplify this is the dress code. Does Jane Street empower you to be your true self or do they prefer that everyone is the same kind of suit-wearing professional that banking institutions often want? In general, all of this together gives me the perception that working at such a company would be far more intense. Working at a FAANG is sometimes stressful enough, knowing that there is a flexible and (what I at least consider) a progressive culture backing the company makes the stress easier to manage in some ways.
Zaheer 6y ago
Also worth noting that Jane Street interns are amongst the highest paid at $83.65 / hour: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/ https://www.levels.fyi/internships/
- giantg2 6y ago
  Wow
zerr 6y ago
Engineers or quants? For the latter it is a common case in most trading shops.
nickbauman 6y ago
When we say "algorithmic trading" is this synonymous to "high frequency trading"?
- kevstev 6y ago
  Technically HFT is a subset of algorithmic trading. Algorithmic trading can be done on both the buy (IE hedge fund) and sell (Investment bank) side, but does not need to be high frequency. High Frequency also means low latency- sub millisecond, and I have never seen an algo trading system of any sort that deals in latencies that are not in the millisecond range, though this isn't really a requirement. Does this help?
  - nickbauman 6y ago
    Yes. So seller A wants to sell for $1.00 and buyer B is willing to buy at $1.06, an algorithm will calculate the presence of this potential (or actually have knowledge from other systems that this a certainty) and purchase seller A's stock with a margin of overhead of $1.03 and sell to buyer B for $1.06 netting $0.03. The algorithm is essentially a parasitic entity.
    - cltby 6y ago
      Can you explain to me very carefully why the orders of seller A and buyer B weren't able to match before Mr. Evil HFT came along? Moreover, given that buyer and seller weren't able to match without Mr. E. HFT's help, hasn't he in fact rendered a valuable service (for which he should, of course, be paid)?
      - nickbauman 6y ago
        So that's the missing part you say? The Internet has been the biggest catalyst of disintermediation in history. But this is not disintermediatable without HFT?
        cltby 6y ago

by davidu 6y ago

polote 6y ago

> Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year. Do you have a source for such claim ? data from h1b salary [1] tells that senior software make 200k base, and here [2] they explain that the average salary is 440k [1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=JANE%20STREET&job= https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=JANE%20STREET&job= [2] https://news.efinancialcareers.com/fr-en/307393/jane-street-pay https://news.efinancialcareers.com/fr-en/307393/jane-street-...

TylerE 6y ago
Wall Street jobs are very very performance bonus driven. Not unusual for bonuses to be 5x or more salary in a good year.
- maest 6y ago
  It's rarely the case that Technology sees those kinds of bonuses; that's most common on the Investment side. And yes, even places like Jane Street separate between Investement and Tech.
  - davidu 6y ago
    The investment side is engineering. If you're talking about IT that makes the printer work, sure.
    - maest 6y ago
      I cannot speak for Jane Street, in particular, but I have spent many years working at a very similar firm, and Investment is not Technology. There are engineers working in Investment, yes, but the risk profiles, the payout profiles and the focus of their work is very different. Investment deals with getting and analysing data, understanding the market and their algos, coming up with trading ideas, handling their PB relationships, doing the actual trading (e.g. portfolio optim, factor hedging, worrying about financing and borrow costs) etc. Technology deals with all things infra and (in most places) ingesting data and making it easily available internally. In particular, I would be surprised if the interns in this article were on the Investment side - a fund would rarley publish anything remotely resembling research. In fact: "Yulan ended up working with both the trading desk that was running this process, as well as the research group, which pointed her at some cleaner cost functions to optimize, as well as encouraging her to try out simulated annealing in addition to the greedy algorithm she started with." The "research group" and the "trading desk" are Investment.
      - davidu 6y ago
        It's too hard to fully explain how wrong this is, so just leaving the comment in case someone else reads it and thinks it might be right. The investors are engineers. Full stop. They write code. The code makes trades. Everything else is noise to support the engineers writing code to make trades.
      - logicslave 6y ago
        You can tell someone worked on the old wallstreet when they jump to explain that engineers are not a part of the core finance business. I've seen this trope a million times, and it used to be true. In 2020, the hedge funds making the most money are the ones treating their technology people like they treat their investment people. They interact, receive similar (though not 2M+) pay, and the programmer often has a part in analyzing the data and building the libraries to push the research forwards.
        maest 6y ago
        You're basing your assumptions on very little information. In particular, my position was with a buy-side fund set up in the last 5-10 years. It was definitely not "old wallstreet".
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    In HFT (and often stat arb) the front and back office dichotomy doesn't apply as much. Basically anyone doing nontrivial engineering work has an opportunity to share in the profits of the firm at Jane Street. They don't need to be a quantitative researcher or trader.
    - twic 6y ago
      Are you stating this from specific knowledge of Jane Street? The division in trading firms, IMLE, is between front office (making and executing trading decisions) and back office (book-keeping, accounting, risk control, compliance, administration, etc). Both sides have technical and financial people. But only front office - both technical and financial - is likely to get wild bonuses from doing good trades. Back office bonuses are more about doing the job well. If Jane Street is sharing some of the trading profit with back office staff, good on them.
      - fractionalhare 6y ago
        I am, yes. I'm more familiar with their researchers, but I know (or have spoken to) people across different functions there. They have security engineers who earn over $1M/year (for one example of something which isn't usually "front office"). For Jane Street it's about impact: if you substantially improve something at the firm, you share in the spoils. That doesn't mean literally everyone who works there is rich, and the quants will do better relatively speaking. But in the sense of engineers being second class citizens: no, I wouldn't say that's the case at all.
        whatok 6y ago
        Most buyside joints don't have anything resembling a security engineer. If they actually need one, it's closer to a front office role than not. You also don't want some random jabroni in charge of something mission critical like that.
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      That isn't the case at the few London HFT companies I've applied to. They had a clear division between quants and everyone else.
- decafninja 6y ago
  "Wall Street" is such a broad term. Places like Jane Street and their like obviously pay technology employees very well. But they represent an absolutely tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the pie. The vast majority of SWEs employed in Wall Street work for various firms big and small that you'd be fairly lucky to break 200k-250k TC decades into your career. No, 200k isn't a small income, but odds are you could match that number at any number of middle tier tech companies, earlier in your career, while enjoying a much better work environment and various other perks. And of course upper-middle to top tier tech companies (culminating in FAANG) can offer multiples of that amount - and again, probably with much better working environments and other perks. Your odds of making it into FAANG or similar caliber tech company are probably much higher than your odds of making it into a Jane Street caliber financial firm.
european321 6y ago
In finance the money is in the bonuses, which on a good year can easily exceed the base.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
davidu 6y ago
I know people who work there. That comp data excludes bonuses -- and most importantly -- that employees are able to invest in the proprietary funds themselves, which generate insane returns.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Another thing the HN orthodoxy rejects is that professional investing and trading can make money above monkey-dart levels, despite the abundance of evidence that it does.
  - runamok 6y ago
    It's not just HN. It's generally accepted that over 20 year spans almost no actively managed fund beats index funds. Example PDF showing this: https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2016.pdf https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2...
  - closeparen 6y ago
    This assertion is about funds that are open to the general public. No one doubts e.g. Renaissance’s Medallion fund.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      OK but it's still just false. Go read this obituary of Richard Gilder who recently passed away. He founded a firm that gave ordinary retail investors consistently high returns for decades. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/richard-gilder https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/richard-gilder
      - graeme 6y ago
        The super investors of graham doddsville is also instructive reading on this point.
      - Aunche 6y ago
        I'm sure that some hedge funds know what they're doing, but it's impossible to tell which are the good ones. Investing in a hedge fund still is functionally equivalent to asking a monkey to throw darts at stocks.
ilarum 6y ago
I have read in forums that companies under-report salaries to the H1B database. They only need to report some number above the prevailing labor market and don't need to report the actual salary employees are paid over this.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  I think it’s the base salary that is being reported.
toiletfuneral 6y ago
Curious, what actual value do they contribute to society?
tossingcomp 6y ago
Anecdata, but I totally believe this. FWIW, I get inbound recruiting from FAANG as well as some prestige finance companies. I'm a generalist with no degree but ~8 years of experience. I make ~$300k/year in NY. Given grapevine comp chatter, I'm sure that pre-Covid I was leaving money on the table versus what I'd earn if I prepped and left for FB or Google. I'm super happy with my employment situation though, so I've just been enjoying life. Partially to leave the door open and partially just to see how folks reacted, rather than giving a blanket "no thanks" to recruiters I got into the habit of replying to fancy recruiters with "I absolutely love my job and am not looking to leave. <all the things I love about it>, I wouldn't consider leaving for less than $600k/year unless a new role offered <one of several non-monetary things I really care about>." It may seem silly, but with luck, good timing and not using current comp as an anchor I've doubled up previously. My philosophy is that it never hurts to ask for more than you think you deserve, especially if you don't act like you're entitled to it. This was mostly met with "glad it's going so well there" and I can only assume snorts of derision. Meanwhile, the dude from fancy "headhunting" firm comes back with: "Excellent! With your profile, I can get you at least $700k with one of my buy-side client firms." Feel free to decide for yourself how much weight to give the anecdote. Maybe that # has a real basis for someone with (at the time) 5-6 years of experience. Maybe he assumed I must be making something near it already. Maybe he was saying anything to get his foot in the door. Or, maybe he decided I was jerking his chain and decided to have some fun of his own. He certainly made an impression.
- wuschel 6y ago
  I am impressed. Would you perhaps consider a chat/call? Would really love to hear what you are working on, and what skills you developed. My contact details are in my profile. Cheers!
- cvhashim 6y ago
  As a generalist, why don’t you get into software consulting and just set/bill your own rates. You can bill at 400/hr and earn north of 700k.

azhenley 6y ago

That is incredible. Do you know of any [non-corporate] blogs from their engineers? I'd love to learn more about them from an unofficial perspective.

davidu 6y ago
No, but they have a lot of technical content on their corporate blog. They recruit from all the topcoder kind of competitions for those interested in meeting people who work there.
Tinyyy 6y ago
I wrote a single blog post before I started working. https://tianyi.io/post/chicago1/ https://tianyi.io/post/chicago1/

fractionalhare 6y ago

"Routinely" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I can confirm it's possible, as I've been in the industry and have spoken to people who make seven figures at Jane Street. But I would rather say it's "reasonably attainable" for an engineer who has been there for at least five - seven years and is really hitting their stride with the type of work. They do routinely beat out top tech compensation, and most engineers there are doing quite well - in the mid - high six figures. This is still saying a lot, since it's not really reasonably attainable for someone to hit seven figures per year even in FAANG - that would require an exceptional package at L7/E7, a good package at L8/E8, or very lucky timing and significant stock growth at L6/E6. Most engineers will never reach those levels. There is a caveat to mention: keep in mind that compensation at these firms exhibits survivorship bias. A new grad engineer at Jane Street will receive around $300 - 400k all in first year compensation: around $150k base, $150k guaranteed end year bonus and $100k sign on bonus. From there, what typically happens is further recalibration a year later. Either you're good enough to maintain at least that level of comp, and you stay, or you're out within a year or two. This means that you may not get an initial pay raise by joining, if you're extended an offer. Engineering offers from top trading firms are often an initial paycut, or an equivalent package, for anyone who is senior or higher at a place like Google and Facebook. You don't generally get to really significant compensation beyond tech until you're a few years in, and implicit in that assumption is that you'll actually stay there. So let's say you're a new grad with offers from Jane Street, Citadel, Google and Facebook. You'll probably get $400k from Jane Street and Citadel and $200k from Google and Facebook, including sign on bonuses. If you join one of the trading firms right out of school, you'll develop an affinity for the work faster (if you're good enough to stay), and you can reasonably expect to make up to $1M/year by the time you're 30. But now let's say you're L6/E6 at Google/Facebook. Maybe you're 30 and have $500k total compensation per year. Jane Street isn't going to offer you significantly more than half a million a year just because of your level in tech, unless they have a really pressing need and you're an industry expert. You will probably receive about the same package, with the possibility of making significantly more after developing more experience with their tech stack and work, after a year or two. The "shock and awe" competitive packages are given to new grads who can be developed from day one, but senior hires require further calibration. There is a ceiling on what trading firms are willing to offer people who have exceptional promise but otherwise no domain experience in finance. In any case the people I know at Jane Street are consistently exceptional. I highly recommend the firm if you're interested in their work. Likewise Hudson River Trading has a very similar profile but is smaller and has more of a startup feel to it.

freewilly1040 6y ago

Do they have any plans to go fully remote? I see job postings which still reference specific cities.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jarsin 6y ago

How does a normal software developer go about getting in? Do they give the traditional google interview or worse?

wk_end 6y ago
I don't know about "worse", but unless things have changed in the past few years, yes, I'd say it's a "traditional" interview ("code up a rough solution to this algorithmic problem on a whiteboard/laptop"), and yes, I'd say it's harder - they're widely considered to be some of the hardest interviews in the industry, and personal anecdote for confirmation: about five years ago I interviewed at Jane Street and Google on subsequent days. The Jane Street interview was one of the most exhausting batteries of my life; by comparison the Google one was a cakewalk.
giantg2 6y ago
I hate to break it to you, but if you're a normal developer like me (you're probably better), then you aren't getting in. There was a recent post on HN about how to be ok with not being a 10x dev or something like that. There's some good stuff in there.
- ibn-python 6y ago
  Can you link to that discussion?
  - giantg2 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261826
nilkn 6y ago
I interviewed for an internship as a quantitative researcher at Jane Street in college, and I can confirm it was the most technically difficult interview I went through -- certainly more difficult than Google.
pb7 6y ago

non-entity 6y ago

Jesus Christ. I can't even imagine making that much annually off wage labor. I must have chose the wrong life path.

giantg2 6y ago
Me too, friend, me too. Some of these quoted compensations are more than I've made over my 8 year career.
- fishingisfun 6y ago
  .... i know man. feels bad. but i guess not as bad if i had wasted time with further education in a low income major
  - giantg2 6y ago
    Very true. Now if only my wife would let us move to a lower cost area, then I might be able to retire from my soul sucking job a lot earlier...
throwawydedbee 6y ago
Maybe. I grossed around $300K at a JS competitor, but quit after a few years. These can be unpleasant places to work. High concentration of jerks. Highly secretive, which means it can be hard to find useful things to do. And they're rolling in dough, which means that there's very little motivation to do things right or care about retention. On top of that, cost-of-living in NY is very high, taxes on high salaries are very high, and it makes you a target (e.g., divorce, lawsuits, etc.). And as a final cherry, you'd be using OCaml all day, which while interesting, is a language you'll never see again in your career. I wouldn't beat myself up about it.

hvs 6y ago

I think Jane Street is single-handedly keeping OCaml a production-level language (which is a good thing, because it's a great mix of functional programming with a practical/pragmatic approach). If you haven't tried OCaml (or F# which is based on it), I highly recommend it.

52-6F-62 6y ago
How do you think it would go learning "backwards" from Elixir (which I'm currently learning w/ Phoenix for another purpose)? I've glimpsed through Reason/Bucklescript but never spent real time in them.
- hvs 6y ago
  I'm not familiar with Elixir, so I can't speak to that. But I would say that once you are familiar with functional programming, the choice of language comes down to what stack your company already uses, library support, and problem area. For instance, I would love to use OCaml, but we are primarily a dotnet house, so I use F# when I can. For Spark stuff, I use Scala. I'm not a language zealot, I prefer to use functional languages, and encourage their use when I can, but I use the best tool for the job within the constraints of the environment I'm working in. Not sure that's helpful, but I would just say if you are using Elixir you're probably already in a good place development-wise.
Scarbutt 6y ago
Is there any reason learn OCaml over F# for a new project?
- hvs 6y ago
  I would look at what libraries you need. If you're a Microsoft house, I would go with F#. If performance is the highest priority, I would go with OCaml.
- claydavisss 6y ago
  To turn this around a bit, I don't think dispensing with F# is that difficult. Practically everything interesting comes from the .Net SDKs and as a result, any nontrivial F# code will be sprinkled with C#-style API calls etc. I expected a friendlier Haskell but then realized it was more like a Typescript for C#.

dom96 6y ago

I don't know about anyone else but I have a negative perception of tech companies in the financial sector. Perhaps my perception is wrong, so I'm curious, how does the culture compare to one at Google or Facebook?

wk_end 6y ago
You can't really compare JS to Google or Facebook. It's still a company of < 1000 people, I think. I've never worked at a FAANG, though I've worked at companies only ~1 order of magnitude smaller. Any of these might have changed in the last few years since I left. * Very flat hierarchy and very limited bureaucracy. At JS there's like at most two people between you and the folks who run the place. * JS is technically isolated. They're not really part of the same conversation as the web-focused and much more public tech giants are. Lots of NIH, custom hand-rolled solutions. Maybe part of that is a consequence of going all-in on an ecosystem (Ocaml) that basically only you use and run, maybe part of that is that really smart people love to invent their own better solutions to problems, maybe part of that is that most of what JS does is either, like, command-line/TUI apps for traders to interact with or trading systems where a proprietary technical advantage is where you get your edge. * There's a particular Jane Street "way of thinking". Another comment on this thread exemplifies it pretty well [1] - technocratic and rationalist. If you don't fit into that mould you'll feel out of place, if you can even get hired at all. * More of a 9-6, butt-in-chair mentality than at other tech jobs I've worked. There's some flexibility about the 9-6 thing (and 9-6 can be pretty optimistic at times), but they're limited by the nature of the markets. At the time and for me, anyway, there was zero possibility of ever doing any work at home. COVID may have changed this. * There's still things clubs, office events, and perks, but to a lesser degree and more informally than at larger companies. It feels more like working a regular job at a real business. JS is also a lot smaller and more homogenous (see above), so less of that is needed to create social cohesion. If you have specific questions, or can elaborate on what your "negative perception" entails, I can probably comment further. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24273348
- dom96 6y ago
  > More of a 9-6, butt-in-chair mentality than at other tech jobs I've worked. There's some flexibility about the 9-6 thing (and 9-6 can be pretty optimistic at times), but they're limited by the nature of the markets. At the time and for me, anyway, there was zero possibility of ever doing any work at home. COVID may have changed this. This sort of thing precisely. My perception of these companies is that they are not as understanding about work-life balance, PTO, working from home, and ultimately trusting you to be independent. There is also a more corporate image that these companies have in my eyes, one thing that would likely exemplify this is the dress code. Does Jane Street empower you to be your true self or do they prefer that everyone is the same kind of suit-wearing professional that banking institutions often want? In general, all of this together gives me the perception that working at such a company would be far more intense. Working at a FAANG is sometimes stressful enough, knowing that there is a flexible and (what I at least consider) a progressive culture backing the company makes the stress easier to manage in some ways.

Zaheer 6y ago

Also worth noting that Jane Street interns are amongst the highest paid at $83.65 / hour: https://www.levels.fyi/internships/ https://www.levels.fyi/internships/

giantg2 6y ago
Wow

zerr 6y ago

Engineers or quants? For the latter it is a common case in most trading shops.

nickbauman 6y ago

When we say "algorithmic trading" is this synonymous to "high frequency trading"?

kevstev 6y ago
Technically HFT is a subset of algorithmic trading. Algorithmic trading can be done on both the buy (IE hedge fund) and sell (Investment bank) side, but does not need to be high frequency. High Frequency also means low latency- sub millisecond, and I have never seen an algo trading system of any sort that deals in latencies that are not in the millisecond range, though this isn't really a requirement. Does this help?
- nickbauman 6y ago
  Yes. So seller A wants to sell for $1.00 and buyer B is willing to buy at $1.06, an algorithm will calculate the presence of this potential (or actually have knowledge from other systems that this a certainty) and purchase seller A's stock with a margin of overhead of $1.03 and sell to buyer B for $1.06 netting $0.03. The algorithm is essentially a parasitic entity.
  - cltby 6y ago
    Can you explain to me very carefully why the orders of seller A and buyer B weren't able to match before Mr. Evil HFT came along? Moreover, given that buyer and seller weren't able to match without Mr. E. HFT's help, hasn't he in fact rendered a valuable service (for which he should, of course, be paid)?
    - nickbauman 6y ago
      So that's the missing part you say? The Internet has been the biggest catalyst of disintermediation in history. But this is not disintermediatable without HFT?
      - cltby 6y ago