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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 d

• 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.
    • fractionalhare 6y ago
      Almost no one at Jane Street wears suits. The tech-driven buy-side of finance is very different from the sell-side you seem to be familiar with. It's much closer to small tech companies.
    • wk_end 6y ago
      Jane Street is a finance company, but it's a finance company run by nerds. No one wears a suit. It's not corporate at all.