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Jane Street is big in OCaml and CompSci worlds but the only guy I know who worked there did ETF arbitrage/redemption/creation which has to be one of the most bo

Jane Street is big in OCaml and CompSci worlds but the only guy I know who worked there did ETF arbitrage/redemption/creation which has to be one of the most boring businesses on the street. Is it worth working there (aside from the salaries)?

nvarsj 6y ago
It depends what you're looking for. Best in class engineering and internet scale problems? Nope, you aren't going to find that at any hedge fund. They are much more like small start up cultures. Speed and results are favored over a mature engineering culture and maintainable code. Want to have the potential to make a large direct impact and make a crap load of money? Well then, a hedge fund may be a good fit.
- nv-vn 6y ago
  Jane Street is not a hedge fund and they're pretty well-known for having a huge emphasis on high quality/maintainable code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUqvXHEjmus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUqvXHEjmus
- lowlevellimbo 6y ago
  This isn't really accurate of Jane Street. As the other commenter mentioned, it's not a hedge fund. Secondly, engineering culture at JS is typically the opposite of what you described. A lot of time is spent to make sure all code written is quality, things move slower than a company like Facebook for sure. > Best in class engineering and internet scale problems? Nope This is mostly true apart from a few specific teams and projects. I think most passionate engineers would find the work uninspiring.
  - nvarsj 6y ago
    Sorry, I should have said "trading firms", but they are pretty similar culture wise. Most hedge funds have internal funds as well and they run it similar to a prop trading firm. I think in general though a small company (JS has 900 employees, so I'm guessing around 50-100 devs) simply can't hyper optimize their entire engineering stack to the same extent that a large FAANG can. It's far too wasteful. And I'm talking about tooling, infra, and overall process, not just the code. Code review is the minimum any competent engineering org should be doing.
    - sweeneyrod 6y ago
      There are significantly more devs than that (the total is also over 900, that's from 2018). It depends what you mean by "optimizing their engineering stack". They certainly do put a lot of effort into tooling, by necessity since historically there hasn't been much available for OCaml. For an example of stuff going beyond the open source work to make OCaml usable for large projects, see https://blog.janestreet.com/putting-the-i-back-in-ide-towards-a-github-explorer/ https://blog.janestreet.com/putting-the-i-back-in-ide-toward... Obviously there is a lot of infrastructure that you need at a FAANG and not at a company with a few hundred devs. But any trading company that doesn't want to pull a Knight Capital needs to make sure their software is correct and reliable (probably to a greater extent than most of a FAANG).
Ragib_Zaman 6y ago
There's a spectrum of roles. The role you describe is that of a trader at the extreme end (little coding ability required, manual monitoring of strategies/opportunities). But there are many traders who spend a majority of their time doing data analysis and programming while monitoring mostly automated strategies out of the corner of their eye. There are researchers who focus purely on statistics and ML projects. Some even get to spend a good portion of their time reading papers, expanding their knowledge and doing basic research, not just applying their existing knowledge to financial datasets. There are also Devs. Some work on ultra low latency systems (though this is not Jane Streets expertise). Some work on Jane Street's OCaml compiler. Apart from the OCaml compiler, everything else is fairly typical of the spectrum of roles you can find at the very large high frequency firms. And mid-sized firms are similar yet again, minus the basic research. I would say it is definitely worth working in this industry if anything above sounds interesting to you.

nvarsj 6y ago

It depends what you're looking for. Best in class engineering and internet scale problems? Nope, you aren't going to find that at any hedge fund. They are much more like small start up cultures. Speed and results are favored over a mature engineering culture and maintainable code. Want to have the potential to make a large direct impact and make a crap load of money? Well then, a hedge fund may be a good fit.

nv-vn 6y ago
Jane Street is not a hedge fund and they're pretty well-known for having a huge emphasis on high quality/maintainable code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUqvXHEjmus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUqvXHEjmus
lowlevellimbo 6y ago
This isn't really accurate of Jane Street. As the other commenter mentioned, it's not a hedge fund. Secondly, engineering culture at JS is typically the opposite of what you described. A lot of time is spent to make sure all code written is quality, things move slower than a company like Facebook for sure. > Best in class engineering and internet scale problems? Nope This is mostly true apart from a few specific teams and projects. I think most passionate engineers would find the work uninspiring.
- nvarsj 6y ago
  Sorry, I should have said "trading firms", but they are pretty similar culture wise. Most hedge funds have internal funds as well and they run it similar to a prop trading firm. I think in general though a small company (JS has 900 employees, so I'm guessing around 50-100 devs) simply can't hyper optimize their entire engineering stack to the same extent that a large FAANG can. It's far too wasteful. And I'm talking about tooling, infra, and overall process, not just the code. Code review is the minimum any competent engineering org should be doing.
  - sweeneyrod 6y ago
    There are significantly more devs than that (the total is also over 900, that's from 2018). It depends what you mean by "optimizing their engineering stack". They certainly do put a lot of effort into tooling, by necessity since historically there hasn't been much available for OCaml. For an example of stuff going beyond the open source work to make OCaml usable for large projects, see https://blog.janestreet.com/putting-the-i-back-in-ide-towards-a-github-explorer/ https://blog.janestreet.com/putting-the-i-back-in-ide-toward... Obviously there is a lot of infrastructure that you need at a FAANG and not at a company with a few hundred devs. But any trading company that doesn't want to pull a Knight Capital needs to make sure their software is correct and reliable (probably to a greater extent than most of a FAANG).

Ragib_Zaman 6y ago

There's a spectrum of roles. The role you describe is that of a trader at the extreme end (little coding ability required, manual monitoring of strategies/opportunities). But there are many traders who spend a majority of their time doing data analysis and programming while monitoring mostly automated strategies out of the corner of their eye. There are researchers who focus purely on statistics and ML projects. Some even get to spend a good portion of their time reading papers, expanding their knowledge and doing basic research, not just applying their existing knowledge to financial datasets. There are also Devs. Some work on ultra low latency systems (though this is not Jane Streets expertise). Some work on Jane Street's OCaml compiler. Apart from the OCaml compiler, everything else is fairly typical of the spectrum of roles you can find at the very large high frequency firms. And mid-sized firms are similar yet again, minus the basic research. I would say it is definitely worth working in this industry if anything above sounds interesting to you.