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What the interns have wrought, 2021 edition
- kalekold 5y agoDo the interns get paid?
- WJW 5y ago> Like most companies, Jane Street also doesn't discuss pay. However, as we reported last year, pay for U.S. trading interns at Jane Street in 2020 was $14.5k a month, plus an extra $500 a week work from home stipend (making $16.5k as a monthly total) for. From https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/finance/jane-street-pay https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/finance/jane-street-p...
- jon-wood 5y agoThey’re paying their interns how much? Either finance pays way more than I thought, or that’s wildly off - for comparison as the most senior developer in our London based organisation, having been here since the beginning, I make about $11k a month.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- travelbuffoon 5y ago14.5k is almost the monthly base pay for a senior software engineer at a FANG in Bay Area/NY/Seattle/ZRH (not counting bonus and stock though - which make a significant difference). So it does seem very high, but not impossible?
- saagarjha 5y agoNo way, I get more than that at an entry position outside of FANG. Senior software engineer pay starts at $25k/month and goes up from there. Edit: I just noticed base pay–then yes, that's about what it'd be, but base pay tends to cap out very quickly so it's not a good measure of compensation.
- exdsq 5y agoI moved to the bay area at the same time as taking a senior engineering role for an Eastern European startup on $100k - feel like I missed a trick lol :P To be fair I don't care about salaries as much as half of HN appear to, I'm quite comfortable on that with a wife on a postdocs wage too.
- Jach 5y agoI believe Salesforce offered interns in SF something like $8600+/mo and an option of company-provided housing or an $8k stipend, if they took the latter then their effective pay would be a bit over $11k/mo. So yeah, it doesn't sound unreasonable. Internships only lasted 3 months, so it's not a big burden on the company, plus it gives the intern a salary proxy for what they can expect as minimum if they're invited back for full time the next summer after graduation.
- speedgoose 5y agoAs a senior developer in Europe, I'm considering becoming an intern.
- csunbird 5y agoDefinitely - although the salaries here (at least in Berlin) are raising from what I can see as well
- saagarjha 5y agoJane Street interns are known (maybe not in this conversation :P) to get paid exceptionally well. A typical software engineering intern at a large Bay Area company is probably making something approaching $10k.
- formerly_proven 5y agoThat’s about the ballpark for a paid SE intern in Germany (per annum, of course).
- rauljara 5y agoFormer Jane Streeter: yes, finance can pay very well. Of course there’s a lot of variance, but at least when I was there Jane Street made an effort to be the very highest in terms of compensation for interns. The numbers don’t seem off to me. Yes, I understand how ridiculous that is
- noir_lord 5y agoI don't think it is ridiculous if you can afford to and want to pay the absolute top line to get the "best" (best by their metrics not everyone else's - not trying to spark a war). If you are ultra profitable then the difference between paying market rate and top of market rate might be double the salary and that would still be a rounding error on a spreadsheet somewhere. I guess it also depends how sensitive your output is to the quality of the developers, lots of enterprises I've worked for you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between a competent developer and an excellent developer since the end result is from a distance pretty much the same in that case it would make no sense to pay more than will get you a bunch of competent developers. My impression from the outside is that janestreet does see that value. Some what correlated I love it when companies say "We hire the absolute best developers" and you ask what they pay and market-rate is the answer. JaneStreet remains fascinating to me though because while they do programming and I'm a programmer we are almost different species because of the problems we solve - which makes it interesting to me.
- throwaway6734 5y agowhat's ridiculous about it?
- deadmutex 5y agoA couple of other notes: Finance non-competes seem to be MUCH more restrictive than tech. Also, you have to average 5-year comps... because Finance pay can be very volatile. Also, in tech, many more companies try to filter out non-team players during interviews.
- carnitine 5y agoJane Street pay graduates in London several hundred thousand pounds.
- geofft 5y agoFinance pays at least as well as FAANGs (anecdote: in 2017 I had an offer from a FAANG and a finance company, the finance offer was slightly higher, and the FAANG flat-out refused to negotiate a finance offer), and also my sense is that salaries outside the US aren't keeping up at all with the US. The salary numbers on https://levels.fyi https://levels.fyi seem to be plausible enough for US FAANG salaries, if you want an idea of what they look like.
- chrisseaton 5y agoJane Street can’t pay any stock (proprietary firm) so they have to pay a lot more cash.
- pc86 5y agoDo UK/European organizations typically give employees stock?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- saddlerustle 5y agoI think you're not up to date on the engineering market in London. Google London pays $11k/m (£100k/y) TC to strong new grads these days, and it's not uncommon for exceptional ICs in finance to earn up to £1M/y
- TrackerFF 5y agoJane Street candidates are already top shelf candidates, and can pretty much write their own tickets - so it's in the best interest of companies like JS to capture them for potential full-time employment, before they graduate. A solid salary helps.
- thrav 5y agoAs an American who worked in London and at a London company, London pay is always crazy low compared to what I’d expect.
- barry-cotter 5y agoThe lowest pay recorded for Google in London is $124,000, for L3, new grad. The lowest for L4, which you would surely get as an experienced hire, is $155,000. You get paid roughly as much as the lowest paid permanent fulltime staff at Google. https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&search=google%20lond https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...
- overrun11 5y ago180k annualized salary for the top few students from MIT, Waterloo, Stanford etc is a steal. They might lack sophistication in navigating bureaucratic processes but I guarantee you they are far more technically competent than even your average senior engineer at a FAANG company. Most companies don't really know how to utilize people with an elite level of skill but Jane Street clearly does and is willing to pay up for it.
- exdsq 5y agoJane Street pays a lot - I know of people who earned half a million a year when they worked there in their early 20s
- jdavis703 5y agoI’m far from the most senior developer at my company and I make far more than that here in the U.S. To the point I would be insulted if I got a job offer for $11k a month. The thing is, salaries for engineering talent is just really low in London.
- Nursie 5y ago> the most senior developer in our London based organisation, having been here since the beginning, I make about $11k a month. Pre or post tax? As a London fintech contractor (until recently) I have able to pull in around $22k USD pcm pre tax, or very, very roughly $14k USD pcm post tax - contractors have various ways to manage tax load and time off so it's never a direct translation. $16.5k pcm for an intern still seems utterly crazy, given my starting annual salary of £21k 20 years ago, but if there is a) a ton of money flowing through the company and b) the intern is able to help them bring in more than that over the course of a year then... I guess it's worth it to them, and that's all that really matters.
- the_only_law 5y agoI saw a ad for a job at an HFT the other day claiming it paid $850k a year, not sure if that was base of TC though. From what I hear though, interviews are hell, worse than FAANG or any tech companies and probably extremely competitive.
- intro-b 5y agoIt sounds about right — finance engineering interns from our school like 5-6 years ago after our 2nd/3rd years fielded offers for $12k-$14k a month, with a housing stipend included
- chrisseaton 5y agoOf course. How would they attract quality people if they didn’t pay anything?
- axelroze 5y agoGood mission statement and socially respectable goals? It doesn't have to be about money.
- chrisseaton 5y agoEven people who work for charities need to eat.
- alentist 5y agoTalk is cheap, but it takes money to buy a farm.
- eulgro 5y agoWhenever I hear about Jane Street and other such trading companies I wonder what do they bring of value into the world. It seems they're basically just working on increasing economic equalities.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- prezjordan 5y agoI personally think it's refreshingly honest to focus on moving a number up and to the right, rather than pretending to "make the world a better place" while the bottom-line is to move a number up and to the right.
- smabie 5y agoExactly. Trading has a clarity of purpose that I just love: unlike other jobs no one is lying to themselves, no one is claiming to help other people. We know there is only one reason why we work together: to make as much for ourselves and the firm as humanly possible.
- Kranar 5y agoAre you interested in a genuine discussion on this topic or have you already made up your mind? For those genuinely interested, for the most part trading firms employing quantitative and automated strategies look to keep the price of derivative or correlated assets in line with their underlying securities. For example a stock ABC might either directly or indirectly represent two other underlying stocks FOO1 and FOO2 and a trading firm will create a model to determine the relationship between ABC, FOO1 and FOO2 so that ABC = f(FOO1, FOO2). The role of trading firms then is to compete both on coming up with an accurate model (one firm might believe that the relationship is really ABC = f(FOO1, FOO2) while another firm models the relationship as ABC = g(FOO1, FOO2) and yet a third firm models the relationship as ABC = h(FOO2, FOO3) for some third asset FOO3) as well as premium (a firm will trade ABC = f(FOO1, FOO2) + small_fee and pocket that fee), as well as engineering aspects such as identifying cheaper costs to trade, providing fast execution etc etc... In the absence of efficient trading strategies or market makers whose job is to maintain this price, what you get is ABC will trade at a huge spread and trades will cause the price of ABC to fluctuate significantly. Both of these properties are vaguely lumped together and called "liquidity" so that trading firms are said to provide liquidity to the market. They ensure that ABC is available to buy and sell at all times at a price that reflects its actual value at every moment in time. If there's some kind of economic inequality created by keeping the price of assets tightly coupled to one another so that their price reflects their actual underlying value then you are welcome to take some time to present that argument. From my point of view having done this now for close to 15 years, I find it to be a very interesting and challenging career that lets me consolidate knowledge from a variety of different fields. I get to study and put to use knowledge of many areas of computer science from machine learning, graphics/data visualization, compilers, databases, computer architecture, networking, as well as other fields such as physics, economics, law. I feel very privileged to be able to work in a multidisciplinary field and be able to see almost in real time the effect of my work. I worked as a software developer at Microsoft and Google prior to this and while those were both comfortable and pleasant places to work, it didn't compare in terms of feeling like you had an actual impact on anything. I felt at both of those companies like I was being paid a lot of money to do basically menial jobs. There is nothing menial about working at a trading firm.
- faizshah 5y agoIs there anything similar to DataFetcher in python? I have been considering using Prefect which is a workflow system with caching.
- faizshah 5y agoFound something if anyone else is interested: https://github.com/syrusakbary/aiodataloader https://github.com/syrusakbary/aiodataloader
- steve_b 5y agoyggvjhjnfjhgtjgjmjgjgm,hgklkhlgk,jc
- jollybean 5y agoAccording to wikipedia they have only 1200 employees. And 87 interns, that's quite a lot. Given the level of granularity in that code, I can't imagine what they are all doing. How do you have 87 people tweak a code-base and then just leave? There's an incredible amount of sophistication in some of those project, surely they're not all used, but imagine the team you need just to maintain any of that. With only 1200 staffers, how many are in Development? I think there must be a huge amount of surplus spend here. Basically, they are swimming in cash, hire the best interns, get a few nice things but mostly it's not that important. But if those marginal contributions eventually do provide a tiny bit of value the amount of leverage involved is so huge that it can make them a fortune.
- ghaff 5y agoWell, they're also effectively spending for an extended job interview.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- asurne 5y agoI think at most top of line places, internships are viewed as a two way interview. Firms get to see how the intern performs over 8-12 weeks, and the intern gets to see company culture/fit for 8-12 weeks. The work the intern is doing isn't the goal of the internship.
- jollybean 5y agoI understand that, but $45K is a huge amount of money to spend on that, and especially for so many. I worked at a blue chip we hired a lot of interns and we put them to work, man they ran a lot of things. That said, it was hit or miss.
- jhoechtl 5y agoWhere are we standing with multicore Caml?
- c-cube 5y agoCloser than ever :) There is a monthly post on ocaml's discourse that reports progress in upstreaming patches into mainline ocaml (see https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/multicore-ocaml-july-2021/8232 https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/multicore-ocaml-july-2021/8232 for the latest). I think it'll happen next year.
- mraza007 5y agoI wonder how’s the work life balance there especially if you are full time employee and what’s it like to work their as a Linux engineer.