10 ms·

Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work

Great article, one I wait for yearly. Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
Comparison is the thief of joy. Be better than who you were yesterday. Exceptional talent is also rare, don’t feel bad if you’re not exceptional. Billions will lead happy, fulfilling lives having not been.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  That’s the trouble - I don’t think I’ve ever improved at anything after working at it. SATs, grades, technical abilities all pathetic after years of work, clearly unfocused and lacking because of inherent genetic defects or whatever.
Dudester230602 3y ago
> Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? Would you not rather be whoever founded Jane Street and gets the largest profit share? Why aspire to be an expensive perfect instrument in someone else's hands?
- LambdaComplex 3y ago
  Because some people would rather be good engineers than be rich.
- piva00 3y ago
  Not everyone associates self-worth to monetary or financial reasons, it takes a quite quirky human (and culture) to give that much of your identity to money.
BazookaMusic 3y ago
Inferiority is how you frame it. You don't need to be Jane Street level to do good things in computer science or life. I've found a job where I do cool things on a compiler and I like it. I don't feel inferior to them, instead I feel inspired from these articles to learn cool stuff and build things I'm proud off. I can say though that when I was working on stuff I enjoyed less (backend ERP stuff), I felt much worse and would compare myself to others a lot more. So I think these feelings you are expressing can sometimes be a manifestation of not being very satisfied with your own life.
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  true, when you work on something you feel personally rewarded/challenged by, you rarely compare yourself to others, i think if you feel like your life is being wasted and you aren't living up to your potential then you start comparing yourself and feel bad.
chronic62141 3y ago
> Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? Just don’t compare yourself with people that work at trading firms. Instead, compare yourself with people that work in tech/FANG
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  I don’t think I compare well with 28 year olds at Google either to be honest!
Arbortheus 3y ago
90% (made up number) of tech jobs are just making CRUD apps anyway.
nicolashahn 3y ago
The people that attempt and fail their interviews settle for FAANG and are probably pretty happy. Most software engineers I've met don't even know about Jane Street. Also, definitely not "in basically every way," but very specifically logical/mathematical intelligence.
- wk_end 3y ago
  Yep. I worked at JS, and there's plenty of ways you're probably "superior" to me. Also, ~almost everyone I worked with at JS was brilliant and I don't say this to disparage anyone, even as engineers there were definitely blindspots. Also also: please remember that SBF worked there too.
  - laidoffamazon 3y ago
    > and there's plenty of ways you're probably "superior" to me. I guarantee you there is probably none, lol. I can't play an instrument, I can't lift, I can't run a marathon, haven't written a book, don't know a Presidential candidate - those are all normal things for the Jane Street that came from HYPSM or even the Google class of people, but extremely out of reach for people like me.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - vgatherps 3y ago
      I know plenty of Jane Street (and other “prestigious” quant firm people). They’re generally smart, admittedly tend towards overachievers, and are otherwise relatively normal people. They’re not a class of god tier humans sitting above everyone else.
    - filoleg 3y ago
      You are a bit delusional about what "google class of people" is, not even mentioning the delusions about the whole concept of those "classes of people" really existing on such a level. Out of bajillion googlers I personally know well outside of work, I know exactly one that knows a presidential candidate, and it has nothing to do with the school they went to (we both went to the same public college in the south). That's just one out of tons. > I can't play an instrument, I can't lift, I can't run a marathon No one is just naturally "good" or "talented" at those things. Those are all just skills that no one is good at (at first), and then they practice those, and then they get better. And yes, not everyone can be Michael Jordan, but I think the bar for "I am pretty good at basketball" is way below the MJ level. That would go for pretty much all of those things you listed. It is all a question of what you are personally interested in and why. Because if you hate playing an instrument just due to its nature, then you probably would find it really difficult to put the time in to get good at it.
armchairhacker 3y ago
“objectively inferior” is rare if it happens at all. Maybe you’re resume will never be good enough in Jane Street’s eyes to get an interview, but unless you also write fintech in OCaml, I bet you’re better than the interns at some niche in software development. These are young interns too. If you’re a senior dev, after a few months of learning OCaml and the popular open-source Jane Street libraries, you maybecould implement any one of these projects.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  I dunno, 2 of these are at top CS schools that I can't get into, and most of their intern class is from Harvard/CMU/MIT/Stanford/Waterloo and the like. I think I might actually just be objectively inferior in all regards, not just technical or in software. I've got ~5 years of full time experience, I make decent to good money (though I don't think most people on HN would agree lol) but I'm skeptical I could build these projects.
  - kyawzazaw 3y ago
    I think you should talk to a professional therapist. > I make decent to good money (though I don't think most people on HN would agree lol) Actually, HN might. HN is not exactly high compensation chasing.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      HN often confuses $300k for low-end-of-normal for early-career US software devs in general, when it’s above most seniors and leads at most employers. You don’t hit that territory until you’re a manager-of-tech-managers, outside the smallish third hump of the trimodal dev compensation graph. My pay’s almost 3x median household income in my medium-sized US city, but is pathetic compared to what I see thrown around regularly as examples of lowish pay on HN.
      - laidoffamazon 3y ago
        Yeah, $300k isn't considered great for my level of tenure, but it is less than what Jane Street/Jump/HRT new grads make.
rvrs 3y ago
>Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? I don't have to deal with this because I don't have a weird inferiority complex towards people who work at some trading firm. The people I know who work there are decent programmers, but as luck would have it I know good programmers outside of Jane Street as well.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  I don't know any good developers in Jane Street because I don't know any Jane Street engineers. This is likely because I didn't go to a top school, because I am objectively inferior. I know many people good at their craft. But I'm nowhere close to these interns in terms of ability, compensation or respect, and my life feels basically over at this point.
charred_patina 3y ago
> how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? How do I deal with being inferior to Alexander the Great? You just acknowledge that you are you, with your own quirks and limitations. Being surrounded by people who appreciate you makes you not really care about comparisons.
darth_avocado 3y ago
Do an MBA and become the management layer of course.
- notsurenymore 3y ago
  Hah, someone a while back showed me a Jane Street job that was apparently writing/maintaining a ton of VBA. Really curious what the interview process for that job looked like.
anon____ 3y ago
Copying a comment of user cperciva from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411614: > more than once I was approached by people who wanted me to help implement their projects. But I have always refused just because I think I'm not good enough. [...] have you ever done that? Absolutely. I'd say that 90% of the time that I've been offered consulting work, I've turned it down because I know it would require some skills -- web design, graphics, SQL, linux, ruby, C++, etc. -- which I know I don't have. I have a reputation for being very good at what I do, and it is certainly true that there are some things I am very good at... but a large part of that is that I don't do the things which I'm not very good at. > how do you deal with self-doubt? If you're a generalist, there's almost certainly going to be someone else who is a better generalist than you. If you specialize, it's not hard to find a niche in which you are one of the leading experts in the world -- because the group you're being compared against is losing the 99.9999% of people who never looked at that particular niche. So I'd recommend looking for a niche; because once you're the world's leading expert on something, it's pretty hard to doubt your competence in that area.
- notsurenymore 3y ago
  How do you find a niche though. I can definitely go looking at jobs and find things that intrigue me, but they’re so rare, that if I waste my time trying to specialize, there will be no jobs by the time I’m “good enough”. I find it incredibly rare to see specialized work that isn’t very senior. Most niches seem accidental, and most people I know who are highly skilled in a particular one are there solely because they were in the right place and the right, narrow time.
notsurenymore 3y ago
At least you’re good enough to work in software period.
markus_zhang 3y ago
I have the same feeling. I just have to fight every once a while.
jkestner 3y ago
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make money off the next financial crisis.
- xhevahir 3y ago
  Seriously. They're in the business of finding ever more ingenious ways of shifting money from one party's pockets to another's. I can think of some important ways in which they are definitely not better than me despite their vastly more impressive technical skill.
- latency-guy2 3y ago
  As they should. Doing whatever one wants is the ideal.
- dchftcs 3y ago
  One way to look at is that the more people who can figure out how to make money in a crisis without adding to said crisis, the less severe the crisis becomes. If someone can price distressed corporate bonds better, they will bid higher, and bagholders of companies that actually have decent prospects (but are hurt by market anomalies in crisis situations) can then lose less money, compared to the alternative. As an analogy, imagine that your home is wrecked in a hurricane, but a scraps dealer is able to offer money for what's left. If there's only one scraps dealer around, they will absolutely rip you off and pay you just enough that you'd be livid and kicking but still aren't motivated to find a way to sell the scraps yourself. But if there are two scraps dealers competing for the wreckage, it'd be easier for you to get a market deal. Scraps dealers improve their profitability by finding better ways to sell the scraps, so in a competitive environment, you could indirectly benefit from their experience. You make them sound like terrible people by saying they "make money off a disaster", but objectively their existence is a net benefit to the situation. One thing that can make this argument break down is that scraps companies may rely a lot on information asymmetry and price gouging, but that is actually less of problem for financial transactions that can be systematically electronified, where there's a lot of regulation and said regulation is more easily enforced. Making markets efficient is a very abstract concept that people makes people feel disconnected from the benefits. But in this abstract way, it does contribute to the economy. Not enough smart people thinking like Jane Street (or any large trading company with a track record of managing risk), but still performing financial activities, is arguably what causes financial crises to begin with. Think people buying into schemes based on returns that are too good to be true, bundling bad mortgages without modeling it properly, or banks not taking clients' money seriously.
asdfman123 3y ago
Lots of people get into places like Jane Street because they hustle and aren't necessarily any smarter than you. Sometimes feelings of inferiority like this are just a backdoor way to avoid having to put in that work.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  I've basically gotten nothing for my hustle lol (except a state school degree and working at Amazon, but I don't think that's considered "accomplished" to these types of people).
  - strikelaserclaw 3y ago
    What about a large percentage of the world born into poverty and barely making a living? I'm sure a lot of people will take a state school degree and think working a job at amazon is pretty awesome or you can compare yourself to newton and feel like an absolute nobody (even if you are a great scientist in your own right). Point is, there are always people to compare yourself to to feel bad, it is never ending.
    - Qwertious 3y ago
      https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-22 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-22
  - asdfman123 3y ago
    Amazon is one of the most prestigious tech employers in the world.
    - laidoffamazon 3y ago
      I really doubt anyone that gets an offer at Jane Street would agree with that sentiment. Nobody at elite schools agrees and they all think my class of people are lazy or pitiable failures of some kind (or at least so I assume).
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
There is always someone with something, for example talent or opportunity, that you don’t have or can’t have. I guess I was lucky to come to terms with “life’s no fair” at a young age. That doesn’t mean I’m defeatist, I’m a very driven person, but it does allow me to be more realistic without becoming demotivated.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  I think that's easier to say if you have a good sense of your own positives, but I don't think I have any.
  - sverona 3y ago
    I'm commenting because I could have (and, in fact, have) said this. There's a hole in your heart that is preventing you from accurately self-evaluating. You are not seeing the whole picture because you're in the middle of it. Go see a good therapist. Consider ketamine infusions if you have the money. I can promise you this: you'll never hate yourself into positive self-worth, the same way you'll never fill a bucket by drilling a hole in the side.
runeblaze 3y ago
Be nice to yourself and challenge that thought of inferiority. "Good enough for Jane Street" often means (much more than) having middle-class parents, decent upbringing, right tutor at the right time. I know people that are not "good enough" because they were never taught how to play the game right, who don't have parents polishing their resumes for them. Of course it still involves hard work and grit, but luck and the birth lottery plays a big role. Privilege wins in this world. Besides, do well in big tech, use that as a stepping stone to trading firms is quite a viable path I heard.
samvher 3y ago
I can recommend the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, maybe you can benefit from it. It definitely helped me work through feelings like this. > being objectively inferior, in basically every way Maybe one reason that you feel like there is a big issue to deal with, is the way you're framing this. In your framing, the scope of your conclusion goes quite a bit beyond what you can actually logically deduce from the available information. If we look at the facts, we have 152 interns who had resume and interview skills that were objectively more suited to landing an internship at Jane Street than your resume and interview skills are (presumably - it doesn't sound like you've tried, so we're not actually sure). These people have probably been preparing for this for a while, and while there is a degree of objectivity to the way Jane Street looks at incoming profiles, it's along very specific axes (probability of success in their fintech firm), and it's not perfectly objective. You're massively overstating the scope of this, they don't measure superiority/inferiority along all possible axes. Then you might counter - no, it's not only about resume and interview skills: clearly the 3 projects described on this page are beyond what I could do as an intern, and maybe even beyond what I can do after a few years of working experience. That would be a fair point - but note that these are 3 out of 152 projects, selected to impress and inspire outsiders, and you don't know how much guidance these interns got from more experienced folks while working on this either. On top of that, many of these interns may have been actively programming since they're 10, so effectively they might have double the programming experience you have - in which case their results make perfect sense, and you just need more time to polish your skills. So extrapolating what you see here to the full set of projects and drawing far reaching conclusions about the interns based on this small sample is probably not justified. I'm sure that these Jane Street folks are generally very good at what they do and that it would be inspiring to see them work. But I think you can give yourself more credit and spend a little bit of effort focusing on things that you're good at that aren't measured in Jane Street interviews, because it's likely that on those axes you'd generally compare favorably to most of the cohort.
frontman1988 3y ago
Nah I just pretend to pity them for working at a soul sucking job when with their 'superior' minds they could have been solving some real problems humanity faces.
fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
At one point in my life I was motivated in a special way, worked really hard, and got to be 99.9 percentile in a quantitative test. Now I’m just a decent coder and wouldn’t stand a chance at a Jane street interview. In my opinion, aptitude is necessary, but people who can pass those interviews are differentiated by a bunch of experience and focus, mental scaffolding that takes years to build. It looks like magic from outside, but it isn’t. My point is you shouldn’t feel inferior, you’ve just been doing different things with your brain. What’s so great about trading anyway? It’s not a particularly efficient allocation of brainpower to society.
RugnirViking 3y ago
> as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer. try it I dare you. Whats the worst that could happen? Ask for feedback, be confident and open.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  I did apply last time I was switching jobs and got a rejection within a few hours. Probably because of my undergrad and company.
up2isomorphism 3y ago
It is a query language, an impressive piece of work, but not something extraordinary.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Comparison is the thief of joy. Be better than who you were yesterday. Exceptional talent is also rare, don’t feel bad if you’re not exceptional. Billions will lead happy, fulfilling lives having not been.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
That’s the trouble - I don’t think I’ve ever improved at anything after working at it. SATs, grades, technical abilities all pathetic after years of work, clearly unfocused and lacking because of inherent genetic defects or whatever.

Dudester230602 3y ago

> Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? Would you not rather be whoever founded Jane Street and gets the largest profit share? Why aspire to be an expensive perfect instrument in someone else's hands?

LambdaComplex 3y ago
Because some people would rather be good engineers than be rich.
piva00 3y ago
Not everyone associates self-worth to monetary or financial reasons, it takes a quite quirky human (and culture) to give that much of your identity to money.

BazookaMusic 3y ago

Inferiority is how you frame it. You don't need to be Jane Street level to do good things in computer science or life. I've found a job where I do cool things on a compiler and I like it. I don't feel inferior to them, instead I feel inspired from these articles to learn cool stuff and build things I'm proud off. I can say though that when I was working on stuff I enjoyed less (backend ERP stuff), I felt much worse and would compare myself to others a lot more. So I think these feelings you are expressing can sometimes be a manifestation of not being very satisfied with your own life.

strikelaserclaw 3y ago
true, when you work on something you feel personally rewarded/challenged by, you rarely compare yourself to others, i think if you feel like your life is being wasted and you aren't living up to your potential then you start comparing yourself and feel bad.

chronic62141 3y ago

> Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? Just don’t compare yourself with people that work at trading firms. Instead, compare yourself with people that work in tech/FANG

laidoffamazon 3y ago
I don’t think I compare well with 28 year olds at Google either to be honest!

Arbortheus 3y ago

90% (made up number) of tech jobs are just making CRUD apps anyway.

nicolashahn 3y ago

The people that attempt and fail their interviews settle for FAANG and are probably pretty happy. Most software engineers I've met don't even know about Jane Street. Also, definitely not "in basically every way," but very specifically logical/mathematical intelligence.

wk_end 3y ago
Yep. I worked at JS, and there's plenty of ways you're probably "superior" to me. Also, ~almost everyone I worked with at JS was brilliant and I don't say this to disparage anyone, even as engineers there were definitely blindspots. Also also: please remember that SBF worked there too.
- laidoffamazon 3y ago
  > and there's plenty of ways you're probably "superior" to me. I guarantee you there is probably none, lol. I can't play an instrument, I can't lift, I can't run a marathon, haven't written a book, don't know a Presidential candidate - those are all normal things for the Jane Street that came from HYPSM or even the Google class of people, but extremely out of reach for people like me.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - vgatherps 3y ago
    I know plenty of Jane Street (and other “prestigious” quant firm people). They’re generally smart, admittedly tend towards overachievers, and are otherwise relatively normal people. They’re not a class of god tier humans sitting above everyone else.
  - filoleg 3y ago
    You are a bit delusional about what "google class of people" is, not even mentioning the delusions about the whole concept of those "classes of people" really existing on such a level. Out of bajillion googlers I personally know well outside of work, I know exactly one that knows a presidential candidate, and it has nothing to do with the school they went to (we both went to the same public college in the south). That's just one out of tons. > I can't play an instrument, I can't lift, I can't run a marathon No one is just naturally "good" or "talented" at those things. Those are all just skills that no one is good at (at first), and then they practice those, and then they get better. And yes, not everyone can be Michael Jordan, but I think the bar for "I am pretty good at basketball" is way below the MJ level. That would go for pretty much all of those things you listed. It is all a question of what you are personally interested in and why. Because if you hate playing an instrument just due to its nature, then you probably would find it really difficult to put the time in to get good at it.

armchairhacker 3y ago

“objectively inferior” is rare if it happens at all. Maybe you’re resume will never be good enough in Jane Street’s eyes to get an interview, but unless you also write fintech in OCaml, I bet you’re better than the interns at some niche in software development. These are young interns too. If you’re a senior dev, after a few months of learning OCaml and the popular open-source Jane Street libraries, you maybecould implement any one of these projects.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
I dunno, 2 of these are at top CS schools that I can't get into, and most of their intern class is from Harvard/CMU/MIT/Stanford/Waterloo and the like. I think I might actually just be objectively inferior in all regards, not just technical or in software. I've got ~5 years of full time experience, I make decent to good money (though I don't think most people on HN would agree lol) but I'm skeptical I could build these projects.
- kyawzazaw 3y ago
  I think you should talk to a professional therapist. > I make decent to good money (though I don't think most people on HN would agree lol) Actually, HN might. HN is not exactly high compensation chasing.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    HN often confuses $300k for low-end-of-normal for early-career US software devs in general, when it’s above most seniors and leads at most employers. You don’t hit that territory until you’re a manager-of-tech-managers, outside the smallish third hump of the trimodal dev compensation graph. My pay’s almost 3x median household income in my medium-sized US city, but is pathetic compared to what I see thrown around regularly as examples of lowish pay on HN.
    - laidoffamazon 3y ago
      Yeah, $300k isn't considered great for my level of tenure, but it is less than what Jane Street/Jump/HRT new grads make.

rvrs 3y ago

>Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? I don't have to deal with this because I don't have a weird inferiority complex towards people who work at some trading firm. The people I know who work there are decent programmers, but as luck would have it I know good programmers outside of Jane Street as well.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
I don't know any good developers in Jane Street because I don't know any Jane Street engineers. This is likely because I didn't go to a top school, because I am objectively inferior. I know many people good at their craft. But I'm nowhere close to these interns in terms of ability, compensation or respect, and my life feels basically over at this point.

charred_patina 3y ago

> how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? How do I deal with being inferior to Alexander the Great? You just acknowledge that you are you, with your own quirks and limitations. Being surrounded by people who appreciate you makes you not really care about comparisons.

darth_avocado 3y ago

Do an MBA and become the management layer of course.

notsurenymore 3y ago
Hah, someone a while back showed me a Jane Street job that was apparently writing/maintaining a ton of VBA. Really curious what the interview process for that job looked like.

anon____ 3y ago

Copying a comment of user cperciva from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411614: > more than once I was approached by people who wanted me to help implement their projects. But I have always refused just because I think I'm not good enough. [...] have you ever done that? Absolutely. I'd say that 90% of the time that I've been offered consulting work, I've turned it down because I know it would require some skills -- web design, graphics, SQL, linux, ruby, C++, etc. -- which I know I don't have. I have a reputation for being very good at what I do, and it is certainly true that there are some things I am very good at... but a large part of that is that I don't do the things which I'm not very good at. > how do you deal with self-doubt? If you're a generalist, there's almost certainly going to be someone else who is a better generalist than you. If you specialize, it's not hard to find a niche in which you are one of the leading experts in the world -- because the group you're being compared against is losing the 99.9999% of people who never looked at that particular niche. So I'd recommend looking for a niche; because once you're the world's leading expert on something, it's pretty hard to doubt your competence in that area.

notsurenymore 3y ago
How do you find a niche though. I can definitely go looking at jobs and find things that intrigue me, but they’re so rare, that if I waste my time trying to specialize, there will be no jobs by the time I’m “good enough”. I find it incredibly rare to see specialized work that isn’t very senior. Most niches seem accidental, and most people I know who are highly skilled in a particular one are there solely because they were in the right place and the right, narrow time.

notsurenymore 3y ago

At least you’re good enough to work in software period.

markus_zhang 3y ago

I have the same feeling. I just have to fight every once a while.

jkestner 3y ago

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make money off the next financial crisis.

xhevahir 3y ago
Seriously. They're in the business of finding ever more ingenious ways of shifting money from one party's pockets to another's. I can think of some important ways in which they are definitely not better than me despite their vastly more impressive technical skill.
latency-guy2 3y ago
As they should. Doing whatever one wants is the ideal.
dchftcs 3y ago
One way to look at is that the more people who can figure out how to make money in a crisis without adding to said crisis, the less severe the crisis becomes. If someone can price distressed corporate bonds better, they will bid higher, and bagholders of companies that actually have decent prospects (but are hurt by market anomalies in crisis situations) can then lose less money, compared to the alternative. As an analogy, imagine that your home is wrecked in a hurricane, but a scraps dealer is able to offer money for what's left. If there's only one scraps dealer around, they will absolutely rip you off and pay you just enough that you'd be livid and kicking but still aren't motivated to find a way to sell the scraps yourself. But if there are two scraps dealers competing for the wreckage, it'd be easier for you to get a market deal. Scraps dealers improve their profitability by finding better ways to sell the scraps, so in a competitive environment, you could indirectly benefit from their experience. You make them sound like terrible people by saying they "make money off a disaster", but objectively their existence is a net benefit to the situation. One thing that can make this argument break down is that scraps companies may rely a lot on information asymmetry and price gouging, but that is actually less of problem for financial transactions that can be systematically electronified, where there's a lot of regulation and said regulation is more easily enforced. Making markets efficient is a very abstract concept that people makes people feel disconnected from the benefits. But in this abstract way, it does contribute to the economy. Not enough smart people thinking like Jane Street (or any large trading company with a track record of managing risk), but still performing financial activities, is arguably what causes financial crises to begin with. Think people buying into schemes based on returns that are too good to be true, bundling bad mortgages without modeling it properly, or banks not taking clients' money seriously.

asdfman123 3y ago

Lots of people get into places like Jane Street because they hustle and aren't necessarily any smarter than you. Sometimes feelings of inferiority like this are just a backdoor way to avoid having to put in that work.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
I've basically gotten nothing for my hustle lol (except a state school degree and working at Amazon, but I don't think that's considered "accomplished" to these types of people).
- strikelaserclaw 3y ago
  What about a large percentage of the world born into poverty and barely making a living? I'm sure a lot of people will take a state school degree and think working a job at amazon is pretty awesome or you can compare yourself to newton and feel like an absolute nobody (even if you are a great scientist in your own right). Point is, there are always people to compare yourself to to feel bad, it is never ending.
  - Qwertious 3y ago
    https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-22 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-07-22
- asdfman123 3y ago
  Amazon is one of the most prestigious tech employers in the world.
  - laidoffamazon 3y ago
    I really doubt anyone that gets an offer at Jane Street would agree with that sentiment. Nobody at elite schools agrees and they all think my class of people are lazy or pitiable failures of some kind (or at least so I assume).

DiggyJohnson 3y ago

There is always someone with something, for example talent or opportunity, that you don’t have or can’t have. I guess I was lucky to come to terms with “life’s no fair” at a young age. That doesn’t mean I’m defeatist, I’m a very driven person, but it does allow me to be more realistic without becoming demotivated.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
I think that's easier to say if you have a good sense of your own positives, but I don't think I have any.
- sverona 3y ago
  I'm commenting because I could have (and, in fact, have) said this. There's a hole in your heart that is preventing you from accurately self-evaluating. You are not seeing the whole picture because you're in the middle of it. Go see a good therapist. Consider ketamine infusions if you have the money. I can promise you this: you'll never hate yourself into positive self-worth, the same way you'll never fill a bucket by drilling a hole in the side.

runeblaze 3y ago

Be nice to yourself and challenge that thought of inferiority. "Good enough for Jane Street" often means (much more than) having middle-class parents, decent upbringing, right tutor at the right time. I know people that are not "good enough" because they were never taught how to play the game right, who don't have parents polishing their resumes for them. Of course it still involves hard work and grit, but luck and the birth lottery plays a big role. Privilege wins in this world. Besides, do well in big tech, use that as a stepping stone to trading firms is quite a viable path I heard.

samvher 3y ago

I can recommend the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, maybe you can benefit from it. It definitely helped me work through feelings like this. > being objectively inferior, in basically every way Maybe one reason that you feel like there is a big issue to deal with, is the way you're framing this. In your framing, the scope of your conclusion goes quite a bit beyond what you can actually logically deduce from the available information. If we look at the facts, we have 152 interns who had resume and interview skills that were objectively more suited to landing an internship at Jane Street than your resume and interview skills are (presumably - it doesn't sound like you've tried, so we're not actually sure). These people have probably been preparing for this for a while, and while there is a degree of objectivity to the way Jane Street looks at incoming profiles, it's along very specific axes (probability of success in their fintech firm), and it's not perfectly objective. You're massively overstating the scope of this, they don't measure superiority/inferiority along all possible axes. Then you might counter - no, it's not only about resume and interview skills: clearly the 3 projects described on this page are beyond what I could do as an intern, and maybe even beyond what I can do after a few years of working experience. That would be a fair point - but note that these are 3 out of 152 projects, selected to impress and inspire outsiders, and you don't know how much guidance these interns got from more experienced folks while working on this either. On top of that, many of these interns may have been actively programming since they're 10, so effectively they might have double the programming experience you have - in which case their results make perfect sense, and you just need more time to polish your skills. So extrapolating what you see here to the full set of projects and drawing far reaching conclusions about the interns based on this small sample is probably not justified. I'm sure that these Jane Street folks are generally very good at what they do and that it would be inspiring to see them work. But I think you can give yourself more credit and spend a little bit of effort focusing on things that you're good at that aren't measured in Jane Street interviews, because it's likely that on those axes you'd generally compare favorably to most of the cohort.

frontman1988 3y ago

Nah I just pretend to pity them for working at a soul sucking job when with their 'superior' minds they could have been solving some real problems humanity faces.

fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago

At one point in my life I was motivated in a special way, worked really hard, and got to be 99.9 percentile in a quantitative test. Now I’m just a decent coder and wouldn’t stand a chance at a Jane street interview. In my opinion, aptitude is necessary, but people who can pass those interviews are differentiated by a bunch of experience and focus, mental scaffolding that takes years to build. It looks like magic from outside, but it isn’t. My point is you shouldn’t feel inferior, you’ve just been doing different things with your brain. What’s so great about trading anyway? It’s not a particularly efficient allocation of brainpower to society.

RugnirViking 3y ago

> as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer. try it I dare you. Whats the worst that could happen? Ask for feedback, be confident and open.

laidoffamazon 3y ago
I did apply last time I was switching jobs and got a rejection within a few hours. Probably because of my undergrad and company.

up2isomorphism 3y ago

It is a query language, an impressive piece of work, but not something extraordinary.