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Whenever I see posts from Janestreet blog I laugh inside thinking how working on the financial industry at Jane is probably more fun and rewarding than some 90%
by elzbardico 2y ago
Whenever I see posts from Janestreet blog I laugh inside thinking how working on the financial industry at Jane is probably more fun and rewarding than some 90% of the jobs in the so-called tech industry.
- whydid 2y agoGrass is always greener my friend. Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for custom reporting.
- ericjmorey 2y agoProbably not the case at Jane Street
- udev4096 2y agoOP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques. I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit
- fuzztester 2y agosome use a fork of rust with borrow checking disabled. go fish
- shepherdjerred 2y agoIsn’t borrow checking only compile time?
- SkiFire13 2y agoYes, but sometimes it forces you to write slightly slower code that can be proven safe.
- francasso 2y agoWould they also change the aliasing assumptions to something close to C/C++? Otherwise I imagine it would be relatively easy to make mistakes and get "surprises" at runtime thanks to the optimizer.
- n4r9 2y agoMother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
- udev4096 2y agoAbsolutely. The moral aspect is certainly questionable. Although, I wouldn't say "all brightest minds" are going to neglect their moral concerns for getting rich
- eru 2y agoAt one point, Jane Street had a lot of the effective altruists flock to them to 'earn to give'.
- n4r9 2y agoTo be honest, even this is morally questionable. It makes superficial sense in that someone else will do the work if you don't. But this happening on a large scale is still a drain on talent that could hopefully be used for work of greater social value.
- jrockway 2y agoThere's also electronic medical records in there somewhere.
- deepsun 2y agoSome fraction of young minds, not all. I was happy to work at a small aerospace company with extreme concentration of brightest minds. Only because they loved the domain, and didn't mind a salary cut. What a joy and relief it was for me after FAANG!
- hereonout2 2y agoPossibly you didn't mind the salary because you'd already worked at FAANG?
- secondcoming 2y agoNot HFT, but we disable those on our cloud VMs
- deivid 2y agoSome jobs at HFT deal with a lot of this fun--I was doing Linux at one for 6 years. A lot of jobs are extremely mundane though, compliance, regulations, legacy code bases, etc. Yes, all mitigations get disabled
- cduzz 2y agoOf course the mitigations get disabled. What's the threat model where your HFT application's running hostile / untrusted code? I'd like this stuff enabled on my desktop because I'm not sure what hideous javascript is being dumped into my browser by some advertising network. But my trading platform? If the badguys are able to execute these attacks there, it's because they've got full access already.
- nly 2y agoMost of them simply bypass the Linux kernel altogether Processes reading and writing directly to FPGA/NIC ring buffers. Shunning TCP in favour of UDP based protocols that are easy to optimize for your particular usecas in userspace. Removing cores from the Linux scheduler entirely and pinning processes to those cores. This stuff isn't even novel, it's been standard practice for a couple of decades.
- globular-toast 2y agoMaybe, but could you live with the fact that you're providing absolutely no value to the world? It always makes me sad when the greatest minds get gobbled up by these companies because they're creaming off the top of an enormously complex system they created.
- boxed 2y agoOne could argue that the OCaml work they do is skimming off the top of the fintech world and putting that money to better use :P
- smabie 2y agoPeople outside the industry just use that as cope because they making way less money. "How do you live with yourself making high 6 fig / 7 figs a yr?" Quite easily in fact.
- wrngadsa 2y ago[dead]
- globular-toast 2y agoI did work in the industry briefly and can confirm it is actually full of people who would post a comment like this. Just in case anyone needed another reason to avoid it! Work on real problems. Try to make real people's lives better and happier. There are real problems in finance but my feeling was it's all very simple and solved decades ago, now it's just pointless complexity that isn't solving anyone's problems. I recommend John Kay's Other People's Money for a primer on what finance is actually good for and where it's gone wrong. The real big problem in finance IMO is digital cash. Bitcoin started out trying to solve that problem, and there are still some people in the community interested in it, but it's mostly of interest to the finance guys now. Just another "instrument" in their "portfolios".
- philipwhiuk 2y ago> Work on real problems. Try to make real people's lives better and happier. There are real problems in finance but my feeling was it's all very simple and solved decades ago, now it's just pointless complexity that isn't solving anyone's problems. I recommend John Kay's Other People's Money for a primer on what finance is actually good for and where it's gone wrong. If the last few years have taught me anything it's that a large % of the population will actively aim to make their own lives worse long term because they are told lies. What benefit is there really in trying to undo their own self-inflicted damage.
- nly 2y agoI had a friend who worked there and he claims they have a tonne of dogshit code and C++ as well. He also claims they're full of elitists from top universities and are not receptive to ideas outside that bubble.
- andrepd 2y agoIs it? Hours are long and the standards are very demanding, and in the end you're just manipulating numbers for profit, so that's not (for most people) a very meaningful endeavour. I still rank it above making people click on ads though.
- vacheron 2y agoPeople really over hype and overrate what kind of work happens at Jane Street or similarly exclusive HFTs. They have their mix of interesting projects and mundane work like any other company.
- yodsanklai 2y agoAnecdote which doesn't prove anything but I have a colleague who left JS to work in FAANG after 6 months because working there was just too boring in his opinion (despite a higher salary). Also, it's apparently significantly harder to land a position at JS than at a Google/Meta. Actually, I applied there a while ago, the interviewer was actually pretty unpleasant, which hasn't happened to me at big tech. Didn't leave a really good impression.
- ddellacosta 2y agoYeah I sent an application on a whim because I've spent a lot of time in FP land professionally and otherwise, I figured "what the heck, maybe they'll see value in that," and I was surprised to actually get a response but it was dismissive and borderline insulting..."there's nothing relevant here" talking about my resume is the thing I remember the most. It was probably the first and only time I would have rather have been ghosted lol
- decafninja 2y agoJane Street and a handful of few other elite shops make up a tiny percentage of the finance industry’s tech workforce though. There are a ton more people working in tech in finance that don’t quite have it as fun (or lucrative) as Jane Street let alone your average tech company.