20 ms·

Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus

357 points by henrik_w 2y ago

wuj 2y ago
Yeah, quants firms are great at PR and marketing. They give out free merch, sponsor hackathons, and organize in-person events with all expenses paid. I study at Berkeley and so many students here rock their merch, which gave them even more exposure on campus. Their effort definitely paid off though. Quants like JS, Citadel, or Jump hire some of the brightest students from Berkeley and other top CS schools.
mayguo 2y ago
[flagged]
peterhadlaw 2y ago
They discriminate employment based on what school you go to, or at least they did circa 2013
- 55555 2y ago
  Don't all companies do this? That's why the name of the school you went to is on your resume.
- pquki4 2y ago
  Even so, probably not nearly as much as McKinsey
- tourist2d 2y ago
  I imagine they also "discriminate" on skills and previous jobs you have too..
- SkipperCat 2y ago
  Its mostly done as a way to filter job applications into a smaller set. When Google was the 'hottest' job prospect (many years ago) they needed a way to reduce the set of applicants down to a number where hiring managers could handle the load. Setting criteria such as having an Ivy League degree or a CS degrees with GPA over 3.8 was a logical way to achieve this goal. That being said, if you went to a community college but also had 10+ years experience at one of their competitors (eg: DE Shaw, 2Sig, Citadel, etc), you'd almost be guaranteed an interview. But once again, thats another very small set of applicants.
  - znpy 2y ago
    > Setting criteria such as having an Ivy League degree or a CS degrees with GPA over 3.8 was a logical way to achieve this goal. It wasn't a "logical way", it was an "easy way". That's classist at the very least.
    - SkipperCat 2y ago
      To a certain extent, you are correct. However, companies like Jane Street need to filter and doing so based on colleges is the most efficient when other factors are all equal. Top tier colleges strive to base their admittance on performance and strive to be racially and culturally diverse. This gives Jane Street the ability to say they filter on the same criteria. I'm all ears if you have a better system that is more efficient. I'd also add that I went to a State college and my resume would have been tossed if I applied as a starting engineer too.
      - gadders 2y ago
        >>and strive to be racially and culturally diverse But not socio-economically.
      - iknownthing 2y ago
        I'd say just go with GPA.
      - tombert 2y ago
        I kind of agree, but I do wonder if that’s largely confirmation bias though; they hire the best engineers they can find from an Ivy League, don’t bother even looking at decent state school people, then the Ivy League engineers they hire do well and they assume it must because they went to an Ivy League school. I know that fancy colleges like to say that they strive to base admittance on performance, and I believe that’s true to an extent, but it certainly seems like they make an exception for students who come from a lot of money. I’ve mentioned this before but think about any politician that you think is un utter moron, and there’s still a reasonably good chance that they went to an Ivy League because they come from a rich family. And it annoys me that people act like Ivy League schools are the only ones that accept based on performance. I applied to a bunch of state schools as a teenager and I got declined by a bunch of them. We can wax philosophical about why I was declined but I doubt it was personal, just that they probably didn’t think I would perform well based on some metric.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  So do most popular companies. they get many applicants for a job. So you have to filter those applications. One way is to recruit from known places where they have already got people from as they know it worked. Typically those universities also filtered on how good you were and so the average quality is higher from those. Obviously there will be exceptions but not work spending time to find them. Recruitment costs a lot in time and money.
- kettleballroll 2y ago
  I come from a very small provincial university, but they still reached out to me 2018, so I don't think so. (I bombed their interview and didn't get an offer, though).
  - tombert 2y ago
    In 2016 I was still a dropout and they did an interview with me. I also bombed it. I have applied about a dozen times since then after getting my degree from WGU and they haven’t gotten back to me; I almost wonder if not putting any college experience on the resume was a blind spot for their filter.
    - moneywoes 2y ago
      How did you find WGU? Has it helped?
      - tombert 2y ago
        Sort of a difficult question to answer if I'm being honest, because I'm kind of a strange outlier case. I was a dropout for almost a decade, but managed to find work at big corporations somehow [1], and the entire time I was pretty obsessed with learning CS theory; partly because I liked it and partly because it made interviews easier. By the time I had decided to finish school and enroll in WGU, I already had roughly a bachelors' degree of education in CS anyway. And that's not just a pseudo-intellectual assertion on my end, I finished all my classes in a single term, most classes were completed in a week. I don't think it's helped my job prospects much; I had already had senior level positions at Apple and Jet.com/Walmart Labs by the time I went back to school, and I suspect that they look better on my resume than a bachelors in CS from WGU. (If you're curious, the reason I went back at all was so I would be qualified for a PhD program, which as far as I can tell universally requires at least a bachelors, and usually a masters, so I just wanted to check off a box. I'm not 100% sure why I wanted a PhD; I think my brain had fetishized professorships and CS research) So it's tough to answer directly. I think for someone starting out today a degree from WGU is better than no degree, and I think the education they gave was "just fine". If you're ok with not working in Wall Street, it's enough to get you to the interview phase. If your goal is to work in Wall Street or to become a lawyer, it's probably better holding off until you can get into a "brand name" school. I'm happy enough in my current position and they don't really care where I went to school, but I do believe that they had a firm requirement for a bachelors (I don't bother checking), and I like my current gig so it's probably worth it. [1] I dropped out in 2012, which turned out to be just about the best time to drop out. It seems like everyone on earth suddenly had a smartphone and there was a shortage of engineers as a result.
- gadders 2y ago
  They might as well say "middle class and above applicants only". You can't claim to have diversity if everyone did the same courses in the same schools.
- strikelaserclaw 2y ago
  A) usually if you're fresh out of school they filter on your school name because the average MIT cs grad is most likely better than the average cs grad from university of kentucky. B) if you have work experience, they filter on where you worked because the average google engineer / HFT engineer is probably better than your average engineer who works at missouri national bank. C) if you've done something great that everyone knows about (like being the author of popular libraries, inventing tools that people use), then you can most likely bypass filters A and B if you can get in touch with a human recruiter (shouldn't be too hard). For prestigious smaller companies which gets a lot of applicants, there is no easy way to reduce the pool without doing A and B. It is unfair and what college you go to might depend on circumstances beyond your control but if you have high ability regardless of what school you went to, you would eventually do B or C and get into the prestigious company. If you don't have high ability and will never do either B or C, then they did the right thing filtering out your resume. In the real world, it doesn't make sense for a company to discriminate against a candidate with higher ability just because they went to the wrong school (unless the company makes money from appearances like law firms, consulting firms or is corrupt and entrenched).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ecshafer 2y ago
  I don't think so. I had interviews there graduating from a SUNY school, and I got a fair shake at it I think, just did pass the interview.
- justsocrateasin 2y ago
  Not true anymore. I went to a shitty state school with no FAANg on my resume, and had a Jane Street recruiter slide into my DMs last year.
udev4096 2y ago
https://archive.ph/d0hvk https://archive.ph/d0hvk
anonyfox 2y ago
If I remember correctly they are also by far the biggest poster child for OCaml, right? Blub Paradox at play here?
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  They're more than a poster child, they made a lot of contributions to the ecosystem. OCaml would be different without them.
  - cess11 2y ago
    I'm very much not a serious OCaml:er but when I've dabbled some in it I got the impression that their "standard library" is kind of the de facto standard library. https://github.com/janestreet/base https://github.com/janestreet/base
    - nobleach 2y ago
      They had Core. Base is their new attempt at sort of a "standard" lib. Not all OCaml-ers use JS libs though. There are some Batteries users out there. When I do Advent of Code, I almost always try to do it with OCaml's built in standard lib.
      - cess11 2y ago
        Ah, right, thanks.
- DrBazza 2y ago
  Back in the 90s/00s the CSFB quant team went with F#. Immutable and functional is reasonable choice. Just not popular. These days, starting or running a financial business with less popular languages is, well, less popular.
  - cess11 2y ago
    F# came out in 2005, and was quite limited compared to the language it became from 2010 onwards.
padjo 2y ago
SBF got his start there right?
- sporeray 2y ago
  Yes, paid quite a lot of money to flip coins lol. There is a pretty big section about his time there in Michael Lewis's new book "Going Infinite".
  - henrik_w 2y ago
    That was the part of the book I found most interesting (although the whole book is a good and interesting read)
- roland35 2y ago
  Sure did! The rest is history...
- pityJuke 2y ago
  (It's briefly mentioned in the article, in the risk section)
hendzen 2y ago
Jane Street made 4.4bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ 2600 employees. Tether made 4.5bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ probably <50 employees.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  There's a non-zero chance one of the companies is mostly legal.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    I would put that to 100%... You don't make that much money without breaking at least some laws from time to time.
    - vintermann 2y ago
      Well, sometimes they only do stuff that should be illegal. Superfast arbitrage, which is Jane Street's main thing as far as I understand, doesn't really produce anything of value to humanity. Yeah, I guess the contributions to OCaml are worth something, but maybe not 10 billion?
      - RockyMcNuts 2y ago
        well, running the financial system is overpaid work but it's the high-order bit in the current form of capitalism. it's the operating system, some people might think it's a tax on everything, some people might think it provides the foundation to produce everything of value. similarly, Google is the high-order-bit in the information or content economy, the creators get underpaid, the people who do ad optimization get overpaid. no financial markets -> no IPOs -> no VC -> no Google and Silicon Valley as we know it. the closer you are to the money and the transactions, and the high-order bit, the better the opportunities to redirect and organize to your advantage, and the more you get paid.
      - alpark3 2y ago
        They're not that good at arb. Real arb doesn't even really exist anymore. Even when it does, it's not JS that closes it. They market make, which is different.
keyle 2y ago
I love them because they keep the OCaml dream alive, but any company shouldn't have this kind of reach, especially in the realm of automation. This probably won't end well... Meanwhile I'd love to know what their edge is... It's probably more than OCaml, although... ;)
- UK-Al05 2y ago
  I think OCaml is more of symptom of the people who they hire. Most companies don't want to hire OCaml and Haskellers. They fear they would be too expensive, and requires clear thinking so you can't hire bottom of the bucket devs. If you want to hire the best and willing to pay that is no longer a concern
  - karma_pharmer 2y ago
    I interviewed with them, a long long long time ago. They use OCaml because it is explainable. Which it is. They use it like a non-lazy version of Haskell -- side effects are used rarely if ever. So there's no nonlocal behavior in the code, which makes it easy to reason about. And that kinda matters when a lot of money is at stake. Incidentally, Standard Chartered has their own compiler for Haskell, without the laziness. The group is led by the guy famous for Cayenne (the first dependently typed Haskell dialect).
  - yodsanklai 2y ago
    > Most companies don't want to hire OCaml and Haskellers Most companies don't even know that these are programming languages. Also don't assume people interested in these languages are "the best". Regarding JS, this is all hearsay, but I think nowadays they hire good profiles (competitive programmers / olympiad winner / top graduates from prestigious schools), ask them hard leetcode questions, and teach them OCaml (which anybody can learn, not particularly hard. Their talent pool isn't restricted to the OCaml community, as it used to be when they were less famous, except for niche use case (compiler work and so on...)
    - bmoxb 2y ago
      I interviewed there and can confirm they don't require you to know any OCaml (though I did have some Haskell on my CV - I don't know if that was a factor in hearing back or not). The questions are LC-adjacent but the interview is structured such that each question builds on the previous one.
Smaug123 2y ago
> At the end of 2023, Jane Street employed 2631 people > About 80 per cent of the company's capital comes from employee equity, which has swelled to $21.3bn at the end of 2023 o.O
- llm_trw 2y ago
  That works out to 8 million per person on average. I'd be interested to see if the Pareto distribution holds here as well, namely that 1% of employees (26) hold half the wealth ($10b).
  - ProjectArcturis 2y ago
    Hedge fund comp is extremely skewed. When I worked at one, in good years my boss made more than 10x what I made, and I made about 10x what my reports made.
  - baq 2y ago
    (PSA: 50/1 is approximately the same distribution as 80/20)
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      It is the same distribution, just makes the point more clearly.
  - infecto 2y ago
    "Jane Street has 40 “equity unit holders on a full-time basis and in good standing”, with an average tenure of 16 years" - I suspect a large portion of it would come from those 40 but that is purely a guess.
  - gruez 2y ago
    I thought the Pareto distribution was most famously associated with 80-20? Of course you can change α to get whatever ratio you want but this is the first time I heard of the 50-1 ratio being used.
fxd123 2y ago
[flagged]
chronic830021 2y ago
> Double the profit per employee than Google > Average TC of 900K > Several unranked billionaires it makes even OpenAI / Meta ML SWEs look underpaid
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others. Maybe for a similar set of skills, JS doesn't pay (much) more than Meta or Google?
  - chronic830021 2y ago
    > This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. 900k is average including janitors and HR. Median for SWE most definitely over $1 million. Turnover of 6%? No way people stick around “only” making 500-600k new grad comp. Check levels.fyi > Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others And some high-level SWEs at JS make 9 figures, not 900k.
    - basil-rash 2y ago
      Janitorial staff is almost certainly subcontracted.
      - walthamstow 2y ago
        I'd agree for any other company or even public body, but I'd bet that JS prefer to keep it all in-house. They are extremely secretive.
    - lupire 2y ago
      Some high level SWEs at Google are billionaires.
      - sullyreed8 2y ago
belinder 2y ago
Why do they say 179,000 million instead of 179 billion? Is that common in their industry?
- infecto 2y ago
  Pretty common in finance across the board to use consistent units and to not use decimals. So in this case the following sentences mention $10 million, you would not want to say $0.10 billion. It depends on whats being presented of course but in large numbers like these, decimals make it harder to read.
  - zie 2y ago
    This! Also because people regularly screw up units(forgetting to convert, etc), so if you keep them all the same, it's a touch harder to screw up.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  Why do we say 17,000 kilometers instead of 17 megameters?
  - mort96 2y ago
    I want us to start using megameters. And gigameters. And instead of (metric) tons, I want megagrams. No kilotons; gigagrams.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      Be the change you want to see. I remember the first time I got those units out of gnu units on the command line scratching my head wondering why I'd never used them before and why it was using them at the same time.
    - zmgsabst 2y ago
      I’m personally partial to attolightyears (about 1cm).
sgt 2y ago
Whenever OCaml stories popped up about Jane Street, I always figured they were about 30-40 employees by now. 2613 people?!
- cess11 2y ago
  I imagine most of those use the tools built by their developers, and do a lot of paper shuffling and analytical work supported by the software.
- geodel 2y ago
  Well 30-40 or more would be just needed to maintain OCaml codebase. Unless basic unit of bonus, salary, buying, selling, vendor payments, building maintenance and so on is OCaml lines of code, I would have guessed ~1000 people for sure.
andrew_eu 2y ago
I often discuss Jane Street as a great model of employee branding. They do well placed adverts/sponsorships (e.g. Standup Maths[0]), they produce a quite decent quality podcast (Signals and Threads [1]), and they have consistent monthly puzzles [2]. That level of investment in branding only makes sense, I think, at a large size. I'm kind of surprised they only have ~2500 people. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths [1] https://signalsandthreads.com/ https://signalsandthreads.com/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/current-puzzle/ https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/current-puzzle/
- neilv 2y ago
  I highlighted Jane Street's recruiting outreaches specifically, when talking with an R&D unit at a big financial institution. (I also mentioned the tactic of fringe-tech-that-some-heavy-hitters-love. OCaml, Lisp, Rust, Erlang, etc.) When I first heard of Jane Street, it sounded like Yaron Minsky was going around to MIT and such, high-touch, trying to hire just a few people. And later, things like this blog: https://blog.janestreet.com/author/yminsky/ https://blog.janestreet.com/author/yminsky/ The only negative thing I recall hearing is Jane Street alumni responsible for the infamous FTX and Alameda Research. I don't know whether the individuals were already fully into hopped-up sociopathic/narcissistic thinking in college, or whether their internship and employment experience contributed.
  - caddemon 2y ago
    It seems their thinking is part of what led them to JS in the first place, which is a bit of negative and maybe they had some ideas reinforced there. But I also think they were some of the more extreme ones to begin with. They obviously didn't internalize JS's concerns about risk at all lol.
    - antasvara 2y ago
      A Jane Street trader's risk tolerance does not equal Jane Street as a whole's risk tolerance. When you have 1,000 traders, each individual trader's risk profile can be much higher. There are also guardrails around compliance, risk management, etc. at the firm level that traders aren't necessarily involved in. The things that made them great traders also made them much riskier choices to lead a larger company. To them, compliance is an obstacle in the way of profitable trades.
paxys 2y ago
> The only founder still at the firm is Rob Granieri, but insiders say it is functionally run by roughly 30-40 senior executives in what kinda resembles an incredibly profitable anarchist commune. Or as Jane Street itself puts it: > We operate as a functionally-organized structure consisting of various management and risk committees. Each committee is responsible for directing the overall strategy of the firm and for emphasizing the importance of risk management to our operations. Each of our trading desks and business units is run by equity unit holders who take an active role in managing our day-to-day operations [...]. Our management structure allows for effective cross-departmental communication [...]. Yes, that org structure full of hierarchical business units with distinct responsibilities and committees and subcommittees and overseers and risk management totally screams "anarchy"...
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  The second definition of "anarchy" according to Google: > the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism. Sounds like a perfect fit.
  - paxys 2y ago
    There is a CEO on top who has the power to fire anyone. There are department heads and middle managers. There is an org hierarchy. There are performance targets and reviews. Nothing about it is "voluntary cooperation". This is how every large company runs.
    - pyrale 2y ago
      On the other hand, this is FT's interpretation. Obviously they're going to have a slightly different take on what "anarchist" and "commune" means.
    - mistrial9 2y ago
      no - fifty percent of managers control their employees through fear.. transparency and the magnitude of compensation and awards are different.. means of advancement are different.. overall "culture" is different..
dangoodmanUT 2y ago
Just got 86 popups trying to look at this page
klelatti 2y ago
Great comment from the FT's comments section on this piece. > A good mate who runs and wrecks expensive cars for hobby once reminded me that course plotting (i.e. research) and braking (i.e. risk management) are the two sine qua non contributors to a successful race. Along with a reminder that disasters happen when businesses forget this (Boeing!)
carlsborg 2y ago
This company extracted ~$22 Billion in gross trading revenue from markets with quantitative trading strategies last year.
mschuster91 2y ago
> net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter That's a lot of money for someone who is essentially a middle-man. What a grift, about 13 dollars for each average American lost out to them a quarter.
- Majromax 2y ago
  First, their trading's global, so "for each average American" isn't the right denominator, nor is it obvious to divide things on a per capita basis rather than a wealth-weighted one. Second, it's not at all obvious that market-making is a zero-sum game, where profits to the market maker are "lost out" to someone else. Market-making profits from the bid/ask spread, but a new market maker tends to reduce that spread. Ordinary people tend to invest as price-takers, and thus they benefit from a reduced bid/ask spread.
drgiggles 2y ago
I work in quantitative finance and have wanted to to start using OCaml at work for years. I just find that unless you are at a shop like Jane Street with a well developed proprietary code base, internally developed tooling, etc, there just isn't the ecosystem available for me to be nearly as productive as I can be in other well accepted languages in the quant dev space...which is a bummer. It's been a little while since the last time I investigated this though.
- lysecret 2y ago
  Also in quant finance. Have you given F# a shot? We use it and are very happy.
- gosub100 2y ago
  It's brilliant if you think about it as an employer that wants to limit employee turnover. Great, you're an ace algo dev in OCaml, where you gonna jump ship to?
- 999900000999 2y ago
  Any tips for getting a first quant job ? Is learning C++ a must?
  - wuj 2y ago
    Good intuition in probabilities is a must.
  - tomp 2y ago
    No, C++ is useful if you want to work in HFT (where you're paid $$$ if you're a programmer). For quants (progression towards a trader / portfolio manager), Python / Matlab / R is enough.
  - detourdog 2y ago
    hang out in bars around the office you want to work at.
    - 2y ago
jddj 2y ago
Some idle trivia, in the London office the d in the illuminated "Food Bar" sign above the cafeteria has been switched off.
- collegeburner 2y ago
  the higher the stock, the downer the foo the bigger the vol, the more imma do
djaouen 2y ago
I have to give it to them, choosing OCaml was excellent bait. Gives them an aura of intelligence while they milk Wall Street dry ;)
taneq 2y ago
Whatever Jane Street is, it’s not big enough to justify that abomination of a popover-riddled mobile site.
jedberg 2y ago
Interesting, yesterday there was a thread on reddit in /r/ExperiencedDevs asking "What place is known as the ones with the best engineers now? One where if you saw that place on their resume you'd automatically assume they were good?" And one of the answers was Jane St. Apparently they produce great engineers.
- charlie0 2y ago
  It could also be that are really good at hiring people who would have become great engineers no matter where they worked.
EMM_386 2y ago
> Jane Street is stupidly profitable — net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter, after a $10.5bn haul in 2023, and a profit margin north of 70 per cent — but it bears repeating. That is the fourth straight year of net trading revenues exceeding $10bn. Gross revenues came at a record $21.9bn in 2023, up 34 per cent from 2022. Yes, I suppose this is all something to get all starry-eyed over, Jane Street encroaching on Citadel Securities, the two of whom control 30% of the US equity market volume. I see it another way. I see people's hard earned money being siphoned by enormous financially-engineered vacuums, never to be seen again. And not just in the US, globally. This won't stop at 30% of the US equity market. It won't stop until the music stops and the last chair breaks. Which may or may not be soon. It will certainly be coming at some point. Five times the London Stock Exchange’s entire trading volumes in 2023 in just your ETF arm? Sure ... this sounds like reasonable growth ... > This is why some people argue that APs like Jane Street have become systemically important. Oh, you don't say! > About 80 per cent of the company’s capital comes from employee equity That's adorable. They're like a little mom-and-pop shop ... except not anything like that.
- hackerlight 2y ago
  Ignorance leads to the assumption a piece of economic activity is zero sum. You see it everywhere
- pas 2y ago
  > I see people's hard earned money being siphoned by enormous financially-engineered vacuums, never to be seen again. can you expand on this? I have zero idea of what Jane street actually does and how they actually make money. (someone wrote that they have ~450 traders. trading what? equity? stocks? dark pools? PE? are they market makers? are they offering services to institution types?) also what does "people's hard earned money" mean? you mean that Jane Street takes away their 401k or ... ?
  - zie 2y ago
    They provide market liquidity. The chances that a seller and buyer come together at the exact same time across the 7.5 hours of open market operations is fairly low, so they buy from sellers and sell to buyers and hold in between to keep the markets liquid. This liquidity costs(often advertised as the bid/ask spread). We could essentially close them down if we moved all trading to say 1 hour a day.
neonate 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240502153841/https://www.ft.com/content/54671865-4c7f-4692-a879-867ef68f0bde https://web.archive.org/web/20240502153841/https://www.ft.co...
ur-whale 2y ago
> it accounted for 10.4 per cent of all North American equity trading in 2023 Which means they're rapidly coming to a position which will easily allow them to game the system (what used to be known as "cornering the market"). I even wonder if their system has already learned cornering by itself via stochastic gradient descent.
- Galanwe 2y ago
  > Which means they're rapidly coming to a position which will easily allow them to game the system (what used to be known as "cornering the market"). These are flows, not ownership. Also, taking Citadel as an example, a vast portion of these flows are not their own, but rather thirs parties offloading their flows to them, so they have the underlying best execution guarantee to provide. An other way to look at it is that investors are moving away from traditional brokers to execute their flows, because these HFT firms have become so good. So instead, investors offload their flows to HFTs acting as DMM instead.

357 points by henrik_w 2y ago

wuj 2y ago

Yeah, quants firms are great at PR and marketing. They give out free merch, sponsor hackathons, and organize in-person events with all expenses paid. I study at Berkeley and so many students here rock their merch, which gave them even more exposure on campus. Their effort definitely paid off though. Quants like JS, Citadel, or Jump hire some of the brightest students from Berkeley and other top CS schools.

mayguo 2y ago

[flagged]

peterhadlaw 2y ago

They discriminate employment based on what school you go to, or at least they did circa 2013

55555 2y ago
Don't all companies do this? That's why the name of the school you went to is on your resume.
pquki4 2y ago
Even so, probably not nearly as much as McKinsey
tourist2d 2y ago
I imagine they also "discriminate" on skills and previous jobs you have too..
SkipperCat 2y ago
Its mostly done as a way to filter job applications into a smaller set. When Google was the 'hottest' job prospect (many years ago) they needed a way to reduce the set of applicants down to a number where hiring managers could handle the load. Setting criteria such as having an Ivy League degree or a CS degrees with GPA over 3.8 was a logical way to achieve this goal. That being said, if you went to a community college but also had 10+ years experience at one of their competitors (eg: DE Shaw, 2Sig, Citadel, etc), you'd almost be guaranteed an interview. But once again, thats another very small set of applicants.
- znpy 2y ago
  > Setting criteria such as having an Ivy League degree or a CS degrees with GPA over 3.8 was a logical way to achieve this goal. It wasn't a "logical way", it was an "easy way". That's classist at the very least.
  - SkipperCat 2y ago
    To a certain extent, you are correct. However, companies like Jane Street need to filter and doing so based on colleges is the most efficient when other factors are all equal. Top tier colleges strive to base their admittance on performance and strive to be racially and culturally diverse. This gives Jane Street the ability to say they filter on the same criteria. I'm all ears if you have a better system that is more efficient. I'd also add that I went to a State college and my resume would have been tossed if I applied as a starting engineer too.
    - gadders 2y ago
      >>and strive to be racially and culturally diverse But not socio-economically.
    - iknownthing 2y ago
      I'd say just go with GPA.
    - tombert 2y ago
      I kind of agree, but I do wonder if that’s largely confirmation bias though; they hire the best engineers they can find from an Ivy League, don’t bother even looking at decent state school people, then the Ivy League engineers they hire do well and they assume it must because they went to an Ivy League school. I know that fancy colleges like to say that they strive to base admittance on performance, and I believe that’s true to an extent, but it certainly seems like they make an exception for students who come from a lot of money. I’ve mentioned this before but think about any politician that you think is un utter moron, and there’s still a reasonably good chance that they went to an Ivy League because they come from a rich family. And it annoys me that people act like Ivy League schools are the only ones that accept based on performance. I applied to a bunch of state schools as a teenager and I got declined by a bunch of them. We can wax philosophical about why I was declined but I doubt it was personal, just that they probably didn’t think I would perform well based on some metric.
pasc1878 2y ago
So do most popular companies. they get many applicants for a job. So you have to filter those applications. One way is to recruit from known places where they have already got people from as they know it worked. Typically those universities also filtered on how good you were and so the average quality is higher from those. Obviously there will be exceptions but not work spending time to find them. Recruitment costs a lot in time and money.
kettleballroll 2y ago
I come from a very small provincial university, but they still reached out to me 2018, so I don't think so. (I bombed their interview and didn't get an offer, though).
- tombert 2y ago
  In 2016 I was still a dropout and they did an interview with me. I also bombed it. I have applied about a dozen times since then after getting my degree from WGU and they haven’t gotten back to me; I almost wonder if not putting any college experience on the resume was a blind spot for their filter.
  - moneywoes 2y ago
    How did you find WGU? Has it helped?
    - tombert 2y ago
      Sort of a difficult question to answer if I'm being honest, because I'm kind of a strange outlier case. I was a dropout for almost a decade, but managed to find work at big corporations somehow [1], and the entire time I was pretty obsessed with learning CS theory; partly because I liked it and partly because it made interviews easier. By the time I had decided to finish school and enroll in WGU, I already had roughly a bachelors' degree of education in CS anyway. And that's not just a pseudo-intellectual assertion on my end, I finished all my classes in a single term, most classes were completed in a week. I don't think it's helped my job prospects much; I had already had senior level positions at Apple and Jet.com/Walmart Labs by the time I went back to school, and I suspect that they look better on my resume than a bachelors in CS from WGU. (If you're curious, the reason I went back at all was so I would be qualified for a PhD program, which as far as I can tell universally requires at least a bachelors, and usually a masters, so I just wanted to check off a box. I'm not 100% sure why I wanted a PhD; I think my brain had fetishized professorships and CS research) So it's tough to answer directly. I think for someone starting out today a degree from WGU is better than no degree, and I think the education they gave was "just fine". If you're ok with not working in Wall Street, it's enough to get you to the interview phase. If your goal is to work in Wall Street or to become a lawyer, it's probably better holding off until you can get into a "brand name" school. I'm happy enough in my current position and they don't really care where I went to school, but I do believe that they had a firm requirement for a bachelors (I don't bother checking), and I like my current gig so it's probably worth it. [1] I dropped out in 2012, which turned out to be just about the best time to drop out. It seems like everyone on earth suddenly had a smartphone and there was a shortage of engineers as a result.
gadders 2y ago
They might as well say "middle class and above applicants only". You can't claim to have diversity if everyone did the same courses in the same schools.
strikelaserclaw 2y ago
A) usually if you're fresh out of school they filter on your school name because the average MIT cs grad is most likely better than the average cs grad from university of kentucky. B) if you have work experience, they filter on where you worked because the average google engineer / HFT engineer is probably better than your average engineer who works at missouri national bank. C) if you've done something great that everyone knows about (like being the author of popular libraries, inventing tools that people use), then you can most likely bypass filters A and B if you can get in touch with a human recruiter (shouldn't be too hard). For prestigious smaller companies which gets a lot of applicants, there is no easy way to reduce the pool without doing A and B. It is unfair and what college you go to might depend on circumstances beyond your control but if you have high ability regardless of what school you went to, you would eventually do B or C and get into the prestigious company. If you don't have high ability and will never do either B or C, then they did the right thing filtering out your resume. In the real world, it doesn't make sense for a company to discriminate against a candidate with higher ability just because they went to the wrong school (unless the company makes money from appearances like law firms, consulting firms or is corrupt and entrenched).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ecshafer 2y ago
I don't think so. I had interviews there graduating from a SUNY school, and I got a fair shake at it I think, just did pass the interview.
justsocrateasin 2y ago
Not true anymore. I went to a shitty state school with no FAANg on my resume, and had a Jane Street recruiter slide into my DMs last year.

udev4096 2y ago

https://archive.ph/d0hvk https://archive.ph/d0hvk

anonyfox 2y ago

If I remember correctly they are also by far the biggest poster child for OCaml, right? Blub Paradox at play here?

yodsanklai 2y ago
They're more than a poster child, they made a lot of contributions to the ecosystem. OCaml would be different without them.
- cess11 2y ago
  I'm very much not a serious OCaml:er but when I've dabbled some in it I got the impression that their "standard library" is kind of the de facto standard library. https://github.com/janestreet/base https://github.com/janestreet/base
  - nobleach 2y ago
    They had Core. Base is their new attempt at sort of a "standard" lib. Not all OCaml-ers use JS libs though. There are some Batteries users out there. When I do Advent of Code, I almost always try to do it with OCaml's built in standard lib.
    - cess11 2y ago
      Ah, right, thanks.
DrBazza 2y ago
Back in the 90s/00s the CSFB quant team went with F#. Immutable and functional is reasonable choice. Just not popular. These days, starting or running a financial business with less popular languages is, well, less popular.
- cess11 2y ago
  F# came out in 2005, and was quite limited compared to the language it became from 2010 onwards.

padjo 2y ago

SBF got his start there right?

sporeray 2y ago
Yes, paid quite a lot of money to flip coins lol. There is a pretty big section about his time there in Michael Lewis's new book "Going Infinite".
- henrik_w 2y ago
  That was the part of the book I found most interesting (although the whole book is a good and interesting read)
roland35 2y ago
Sure did! The rest is history...
pityJuke 2y ago
(It's briefly mentioned in the article, in the risk section)

hendzen 2y ago

Jane Street made 4.4bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ 2600 employees. Tether made 4.5bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ probably <50 employees.

actionfromafar 2y ago
There's a non-zero chance one of the companies is mostly legal.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  I would put that to 100%... You don't make that much money without breaking at least some laws from time to time.
  - vintermann 2y ago
    Well, sometimes they only do stuff that should be illegal. Superfast arbitrage, which is Jane Street's main thing as far as I understand, doesn't really produce anything of value to humanity. Yeah, I guess the contributions to OCaml are worth something, but maybe not 10 billion?
    - RockyMcNuts 2y ago
      well, running the financial system is overpaid work but it's the high-order bit in the current form of capitalism. it's the operating system, some people might think it's a tax on everything, some people might think it provides the foundation to produce everything of value. similarly, Google is the high-order-bit in the information or content economy, the creators get underpaid, the people who do ad optimization get overpaid. no financial markets -> no IPOs -> no VC -> no Google and Silicon Valley as we know it. the closer you are to the money and the transactions, and the high-order bit, the better the opportunities to redirect and organize to your advantage, and the more you get paid.
    - alpark3 2y ago
      They're not that good at arb. Real arb doesn't even really exist anymore. Even when it does, it's not JS that closes it. They market make, which is different.

keyle 2y ago

I love them because they keep the OCaml dream alive, but any company shouldn't have this kind of reach, especially in the realm of automation. This probably won't end well... Meanwhile I'd love to know what their edge is... It's probably more than OCaml, although... ;)

UK-Al05 2y ago
I think OCaml is more of symptom of the people who they hire. Most companies don't want to hire OCaml and Haskellers. They fear they would be too expensive, and requires clear thinking so you can't hire bottom of the bucket devs. If you want to hire the best and willing to pay that is no longer a concern
- karma_pharmer 2y ago
  I interviewed with them, a long long long time ago. They use OCaml because it is explainable. Which it is. They use it like a non-lazy version of Haskell -- side effects are used rarely if ever. So there's no nonlocal behavior in the code, which makes it easy to reason about. And that kinda matters when a lot of money is at stake. Incidentally, Standard Chartered has their own compiler for Haskell, without the laziness. The group is led by the guy famous for Cayenne (the first dependently typed Haskell dialect).
- yodsanklai 2y ago
  > Most companies don't want to hire OCaml and Haskellers Most companies don't even know that these are programming languages. Also don't assume people interested in these languages are "the best". Regarding JS, this is all hearsay, but I think nowadays they hire good profiles (competitive programmers / olympiad winner / top graduates from prestigious schools), ask them hard leetcode questions, and teach them OCaml (which anybody can learn, not particularly hard. Their talent pool isn't restricted to the OCaml community, as it used to be when they were less famous, except for niche use case (compiler work and so on...)
  - bmoxb 2y ago
    I interviewed there and can confirm they don't require you to know any OCaml (though I did have some Haskell on my CV - I don't know if that was a factor in hearing back or not). The questions are LC-adjacent but the interview is structured such that each question builds on the previous one.

Smaug123 2y ago

> At the end of 2023, Jane Street employed 2631 people > About 80 per cent of the company's capital comes from employee equity, which has swelled to $21.3bn at the end of 2023 o.O

llm_trw 2y ago
That works out to 8 million per person on average. I'd be interested to see if the Pareto distribution holds here as well, namely that 1% of employees (26) hold half the wealth ($10b).
- ProjectArcturis 2y ago
  Hedge fund comp is extremely skewed. When I worked at one, in good years my boss made more than 10x what I made, and I made about 10x what my reports made.
- baq 2y ago
  (PSA: 50/1 is approximately the same distribution as 80/20)
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    It is the same distribution, just makes the point more clearly.
- infecto 2y ago
  "Jane Street has 40 “equity unit holders on a full-time basis and in good standing”, with an average tenure of 16 years" - I suspect a large portion of it would come from those 40 but that is purely a guess.
- gruez 2y ago
  I thought the Pareto distribution was most famously associated with 80-20? Of course you can change α to get whatever ratio you want but this is the first time I heard of the 50-1 ratio being used.

fxd123 2y ago

[flagged]

chronic830021 2y ago

> Double the profit per employee than Google > Average TC of 900K > Several unranked billionaires it makes even OpenAI / Meta ML SWEs look underpaid

yodsanklai 2y ago
This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others. Maybe for a similar set of skills, JS doesn't pay (much) more than Meta or Google?
- chronic830021 2y ago
  > This is the average, it'd be interesting to know what's the median for a SWE is. 900k is average including janitors and HR. Median for SWE most definitely over $1 million. Turnover of 6%? No way people stick around “only” making 500-600k new grad comp. Check levels.fyi > Also, some high-level SWE do make 900K at Google and others And some high-level SWEs at JS make 9 figures, not 900k.
  - basil-rash 2y ago
    Janitorial staff is almost certainly subcontracted.
    - walthamstow 2y ago
      I'd agree for any other company or even public body, but I'd bet that JS prefer to keep it all in-house. They are extremely secretive.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Some high level SWEs at Google are billionaires.
    - sullyreed8 2y ago

belinder 2y ago

Why do they say 179,000 million instead of 179 billion? Is that common in their industry?

infecto 2y ago
Pretty common in finance across the board to use consistent units and to not use decimals. So in this case the following sentences mention $10 million, you would not want to say $0.10 billion. It depends on whats being presented of course but in large numbers like these, decimals make it harder to read.
- zie 2y ago
  This! Also because people regularly screw up units(forgetting to convert, etc), so if you keep them all the same, it's a touch harder to screw up.
llm_trw 2y ago
Why do we say 17,000 kilometers instead of 17 megameters?
- mort96 2y ago
  I want us to start using megameters. And gigameters. And instead of (metric) tons, I want megagrams. No kilotons; gigagrams.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    Be the change you want to see. I remember the first time I got those units out of gnu units on the command line scratching my head wondering why I'd never used them before and why it was using them at the same time.
  - zmgsabst 2y ago
    I’m personally partial to attolightyears (about 1cm).

sgt 2y ago

Whenever OCaml stories popped up about Jane Street, I always figured they were about 30-40 employees by now. 2613 people?!

cess11 2y ago
I imagine most of those use the tools built by their developers, and do a lot of paper shuffling and analytical work supported by the software.
geodel 2y ago
Well 30-40 or more would be just needed to maintain OCaml codebase. Unless basic unit of bonus, salary, buying, selling, vendor payments, building maintenance and so on is OCaml lines of code, I would have guessed ~1000 people for sure.

andrew_eu 2y ago

I often discuss Jane Street as a great model of employee branding. They do well placed adverts/sponsorships (e.g. Standup Maths[0]), they produce a quite decent quality podcast (Signals and Threads [1]), and they have consistent monthly puzzles [2]. That level of investment in branding only makes sense, I think, at a large size. I'm kind of surprised they only have ~2500 people. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths https://www.youtube.com/user/standupmaths [1] https://signalsandthreads.com/ https://signalsandthreads.com/ [2] https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/current-puzzle/ https://www.janestreet.com/puzzles/current-puzzle/

neilv 2y ago
I highlighted Jane Street's recruiting outreaches specifically, when talking with an R&D unit at a big financial institution. (I also mentioned the tactic of fringe-tech-that-some-heavy-hitters-love. OCaml, Lisp, Rust, Erlang, etc.) When I first heard of Jane Street, it sounded like Yaron Minsky was going around to MIT and such, high-touch, trying to hire just a few people. And later, things like this blog: https://blog.janestreet.com/author/yminsky/ https://blog.janestreet.com/author/yminsky/ The only negative thing I recall hearing is Jane Street alumni responsible for the infamous FTX and Alameda Research. I don't know whether the individuals were already fully into hopped-up sociopathic/narcissistic thinking in college, or whether their internship and employment experience contributed.
- caddemon 2y ago
  It seems their thinking is part of what led them to JS in the first place, which is a bit of negative and maybe they had some ideas reinforced there. But I also think they were some of the more extreme ones to begin with. They obviously didn't internalize JS's concerns about risk at all lol.
  - antasvara 2y ago
    A Jane Street trader's risk tolerance does not equal Jane Street as a whole's risk tolerance. When you have 1,000 traders, each individual trader's risk profile can be much higher. There are also guardrails around compliance, risk management, etc. at the firm level that traders aren't necessarily involved in. The things that made them great traders also made them much riskier choices to lead a larger company. To them, compliance is an obstacle in the way of profitable trades.

paxys 2y ago

> The only founder still at the firm is Rob Granieri, but insiders say it is functionally run by roughly 30-40 senior executives in what kinda resembles an incredibly profitable anarchist commune. Or as Jane Street itself puts it: > We operate as a functionally-organized structure consisting of various management and risk committees. Each committee is responsible for directing the overall strategy of the firm and for emphasizing the importance of risk management to our operations. Each of our trading desks and business units is run by equity unit holders who take an active role in managing our day-to-day operations [...]. Our management structure allows for effective cross-departmental communication [...]. Yes, that org structure full of hierarchical business units with distinct responsibilities and committees and subcommittees and overseers and risk management totally screams "anarchy"...

CharlieDigital 2y ago
The second definition of "anarchy" according to Google: > the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism. Sounds like a perfect fit.
- paxys 2y ago
  There is a CEO on top who has the power to fire anyone. There are department heads and middle managers. There is an org hierarchy. There are performance targets and reviews. Nothing about it is "voluntary cooperation". This is how every large company runs.
  - pyrale 2y ago
    On the other hand, this is FT's interpretation. Obviously they're going to have a slightly different take on what "anarchist" and "commune" means.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    no - fifty percent of managers control their employees through fear.. transparency and the magnitude of compensation and awards are different.. means of advancement are different.. overall "culture" is different..

dangoodmanUT 2y ago

Just got 86 popups trying to look at this page

klelatti 2y ago

Great comment from the FT's comments section on this piece. > A good mate who runs and wrecks expensive cars for hobby once reminded me that course plotting (i.e. research) and braking (i.e. risk management) are the two sine qua non contributors to a successful race. Along with a reminder that disasters happen when businesses forget this (Boeing!)

carlsborg 2y ago

This company extracted ~$22 Billion in gross trading revenue from markets with quantitative trading strategies last year.

mschuster91 2y ago

> net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter That's a lot of money for someone who is essentially a middle-man. What a grift, about 13 dollars for each average American lost out to them a quarter.

Majromax 2y ago
First, their trading's global, so "for each average American" isn't the right denominator, nor is it obvious to divide things on a per capita basis rather than a wealth-weighted one. Second, it's not at all obvious that market-making is a zero-sum game, where profits to the market maker are "lost out" to someone else. Market-making profits from the bid/ask spread, but a new market maker tends to reduce that spread. Ordinary people tend to invest as price-takers, and thus they benefit from a reduced bid/ask spread.

drgiggles 2y ago

I work in quantitative finance and have wanted to to start using OCaml at work for years. I just find that unless you are at a shop like Jane Street with a well developed proprietary code base, internally developed tooling, etc, there just isn't the ecosystem available for me to be nearly as productive as I can be in other well accepted languages in the quant dev space...which is a bummer. It's been a little while since the last time I investigated this though.

lysecret 2y ago
Also in quant finance. Have you given F# a shot? We use it and are very happy.
gosub100 2y ago
It's brilliant if you think about it as an employer that wants to limit employee turnover. Great, you're an ace algo dev in OCaml, where you gonna jump ship to?
999900000999 2y ago
Any tips for getting a first quant job ? Is learning C++ a must?
- wuj 2y ago
  Good intuition in probabilities is a must.
- tomp 2y ago
  No, C++ is useful if you want to work in HFT (where you're paid $$$ if you're a programmer). For quants (progression towards a trader / portfolio manager), Python / Matlab / R is enough.
- detourdog 2y ago
  hang out in bars around the office you want to work at.
  - 2y ago

jddj 2y ago

Some idle trivia, in the London office the d in the illuminated "Food Bar" sign above the cafeteria has been switched off.

collegeburner 2y ago
the higher the stock, the downer the foo the bigger the vol, the more imma do

djaouen 2y ago

I have to give it to them, choosing OCaml was excellent bait. Gives them an aura of intelligence while they milk Wall Street dry ;)

taneq 2y ago

Whatever Jane Street is, it’s not big enough to justify that abomination of a popover-riddled mobile site.

jedberg 2y ago

Interesting, yesterday there was a thread on reddit in /r/ExperiencedDevs asking "What place is known as the ones with the best engineers now? One where if you saw that place on their resume you'd automatically assume they were good?" And one of the answers was Jane St. Apparently they produce great engineers.

charlie0 2y ago
It could also be that are really good at hiring people who would have become great engineers no matter where they worked.

EMM_386 2y ago

> Jane Street is stupidly profitable — net trading revenues of $4.4bn in the first quarter, after a $10.5bn haul in 2023, and a profit margin north of 70 per cent — but it bears repeating. That is the fourth straight year of net trading revenues exceeding $10bn. Gross revenues came at a record $21.9bn in 2023, up 34 per cent from 2022. Yes, I suppose this is all something to get all starry-eyed over, Jane Street encroaching on Citadel Securities, the two of whom control 30% of the US equity market volume. I see it another way. I see people's hard earned money being siphoned by enormous financially-engineered vacuums, never to be seen again. And not just in the US, globally. This won't stop at 30% of the US equity market. It won't stop until the music stops and the last chair breaks. Which may or may not be soon. It will certainly be coming at some point. Five times the London Stock Exchange’s entire trading volumes in 2023 in just your ETF arm? Sure ... this sounds like reasonable growth ... > This is why some people argue that APs like Jane Street have become systemically important. Oh, you don't say! > About 80 per cent of the company’s capital comes from employee equity That's adorable. They're like a little mom-and-pop shop ... except not anything like that.

hackerlight 2y ago
Ignorance leads to the assumption a piece of economic activity is zero sum. You see it everywhere
pas 2y ago
> I see people's hard earned money being siphoned by enormous financially-engineered vacuums, never to be seen again. can you expand on this? I have zero idea of what Jane street actually does and how they actually make money. (someone wrote that they have ~450 traders. trading what? equity? stocks? dark pools? PE? are they market makers? are they offering services to institution types?) also what does "people's hard earned money" mean? you mean that Jane Street takes away their 401k or ... ?
- zie 2y ago
  They provide market liquidity. The chances that a seller and buyer come together at the exact same time across the 7.5 hours of open market operations is fairly low, so they buy from sellers and sell to buyers and hold in between to keep the markets liquid. This liquidity costs(often advertised as the bid/ask spread). We could essentially close them down if we moved all trading to say 1 hour a day.

neonate 2y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240502153841/https://www.ft.com/content/54671865-4c7f-4692-a879-867ef68f0bde https://web.archive.org/web/20240502153841/https://www.ft.co...

ur-whale 2y ago

> it accounted for 10.4 per cent of all North American equity trading in 2023 Which means they're rapidly coming to a position which will easily allow them to game the system (what used to be known as "cornering the market"). I even wonder if their system has already learned cornering by itself via stochastic gradient descent.

Galanwe 2y ago
> Which means they're rapidly coming to a position which will easily allow them to game the system (what used to be known as "cornering the market"). These are flows, not ownership. Also, taking Citadel as an example, a vast portion of these flows are not their own, but rather thirs parties offloading their flows to them, so they have the underlying best execution guarantee to provide. An other way to look at it is that investors are moving away from traditional brokers to execute their flows, because these HFT firms have become so good. So instead, investors offload their flows to HFTs acting as DMM instead.