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Finding Signal in the Noise: Machine Learning and the Markets (Jane Street)
- czhu12 2y agoBeen following signals and threads for a while, and it’s amazing. Have to be in a learning mood, but it gets pretty technical. Podcasts are a tough medium to do that in but if you really zone in, signals and threads is fantastic
- bob1029 2y agoThis one and Machine Learning Street Talk are my two favorites at the moment.
- laidoffamazon 2y ago> In Young Cho thought she was going to be a doctor but fell into a trading internship at Jane Street Genuinely perplexing how they always try to show each multi-million earning engineer as some normal person and not someone that went to Exeter and Harvard
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- foobar10000 2y agoI don't really see a lot of elitism in these circles - there's a chunk of such engineers that did not in fact go to Exeter and Harvard - but what they have in common is they are all to a fault very bright technical people that can produce complicated things quite quickly, and can communicate effectively with people around them - to make sure that what they produce is in fact useful :)
- fireburning 2y agoever meet any such engineers from the bottom 20% of the world population? just some food for thought :)
- foobar10000 2y agoPersonally know of 1 from Ghana and 1 from Nigeria - both engineers in HFT - both emigrated to the US post-college - so not that rare. Is it proportional to population? Of course not. Clearly there's going to be an english-speaking bias and an education availability bias and whatever bias du jour one wants to bake in. I don't think it is controversial to say that being born into poverty hurts - as naively as just accounting for malnutrition, for example, and going from there...
- fireburning 2y agoidk to me bottom 20% is a household thing more so than geographic if you live in Ghana or Nigeria but grew up driving a Maybach or BMW that would't apply if you grew up homeless in the US it would perhaps ancedotal but the bottom 20% more or less stay the same across generations no matter how welcoming an organization is or no matter if an individual is bright or has a good idea
- FabHK 2y agoYou can levy plenty of criticism at finance. But they certainly take smart kids from wherever they can get them (for certain jobs; for others you need certain polish).
- laidoffamazon 2y agoI genuinely don't think people that went to Exeter and Harvard (or MIT or Stanford or Penn or other JS feeder schools) see the rest of us as human unless there's another common factor like being employed by Jane Street and having those quirky hobbies the rest of them do - and then they rationalize it away by saying that the exceptions didn't apply to top schools, or were admitted but didn't attend for "financial reasons". People like me are "NPCs" in their parlance.
- saagarjha 2y agoYou're putting words in their mouth
- laidoffamazon 2y agoAnd yet, am I wrong? This is basically how they think
- saagarjha 2y agoYes, you are.
- laidoffamazon 2y agoYeah I don’t think so. They think the rest of us are insects.
- saagarjha 2y agoI interact with those people regularly without having the same background as them and this has basically never been the case. I think you've just been talking to horrible people.
- ecshafer 2y agoGraduating from a SUNY school, Jane Street gave me an interview and a fair shake. I didn't get the sense of elitism there. There does happen to be a lot of really smart engineers, mathematicians and scientists going to Harvard, MIT, etc. There are places that without that Ivy League or Target School degree you don't hear back, I don't think Jane Street is one of them.
- heavymetalpoizn 2y ago[dead]
- laidoffamazon 2y agoMight be different with a SUNY PhD or another trading firm on the resume. I don't think they'd ever call someone like me back, not that I'd ever be able to pass a coding round with them.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThere are some firms that are very elitist in terms of their resume review requirements. You should note that for a place like Jane Street, "Harvard" helps, but it won't get you an interview. Someone who has done well at USAMO or IMO or has meaningful open-source contributions and goes to SUNY or a community college will generally have a better chance than a run-of-the-mill Harvard student. The median Harvard Math/CS student isn't getting an interview at Jane Street.
- andrepd 2y agoJS absolutely does filter on school though.
- upbeat_general 2y agoSeconding another commenter. I went to a state-school (maybe in the top 5 US state schools) and got an offer without any elite background.
- laidoffamazon 2y agoObviously Michigan, UCB, UDub aren’t in the same category, especially with prior trading firm experience.
- upbeat_general 2y agoAnd it was none of the mentioned schools!
- boshalfoshal 2y agoWould be surprised if it was not a union of the above schools and {GTech, UT, UCLA, UIUC}.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoI went to an "elite" school, but I worked at one HFT where the local team of 5 people had only me with a background from a similar school, and another HFT where I was one of three on my immediate team of ~12 engineers. At one point, one of my colleagues at the second firm asked me why I was there as opposed to the alternatives of (1) a company with more of a focus on the elite and cultivating power or (2) being an artist supported by my well-off parents.
- Workaccount2 2y agoI will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.
- keyle 2y agoI take the silver lining. Smart people getting rich is better than dumb people getting rich. Hopefully some day they'll do something good with that money.
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoTen years ago, all the $1mn+ earning engineers were in trading. Now they are in LLM/AI. Glad to see this happen, Jane Street has increased their advertising here because of this.
- hardwaregeek 2y agoI love this podcast but I can’t listen to it while running. It’s too interesting so I risk falling off the treadmill :D
- __mharrison__ 2y agoI read this and think: "I would love to spend a day with Jane Street and teach them how to use notebooks." So much effort is wasted because of knowledge gaps or systems that don't encourage best practices. I just taught a course to a client this week helping them with this (and other best practices for Python).
- edanm 2y agoI'm intrigued - I didn't listen to the post but wonder what kind of best practices you're talking about. Do you have this written down anywhere or on video anywhere? I'd love to learn more about what you mean.
- jakewins 2y agoI’m intrigued as well.. My experience is notebooks struggle as a format for production code. We encourage people who work heavily in notebooks to use them for exploratory work, but choose other tools when it comes time to ship. When you are exploring something, experimenting, showing.. it’s great; train-of-thought structure, APIs like Pandas optimised for writing and terseness etc. But when you have a piece of code that will lose a million dollars a minute if someone ships a bug, and which will be maintained by many engineers over many years, then you really want a format that’s optimised for long-term maintenance, incremental change, testability, and APIs optimised for readers.
- edanm 2y agoI write production code, I also work lots in Jupyter notebooks. Personally, I think the fact that notebooks are usually easier/funner for me to work with is a big problem. I'm by no means a Clojure expert, but I did do a semi-large project in Clojure a few years ago, and some of the ideas of true REPL-driven development that exist there are things I wish that Python supported. It's hard to explain without actually learning it for real (and most Python devs mistakenly think Python has REPL-driven development; I sure did before learning Clojure!). But once you get used to being able to interact with your actual source code, and at any point just being able to write new code and immediately print out its value, then with one shortcut make it part of the regular codebase... that just blurs the distinction that exists between Jupyter Notebooks and production code in a way that makes everything much better.
- polygot 2y agoVery interesting podcast, I find that the guest was very candid so it was great to hear what it is really like working at Jane Street. The reproducible-Python notebook problem/notebook for researchers mentioned in the podcast inspired me to create a new project, branch-pad https://github.com/alexyorke/branch-pad https://github.com/alexyorke/branch-pad which is an interactive Python notebook environment that allows you to create and explore multiple branches of code execution.
- 1oooqooq 2y agoKeynesian for machines
- mhh__ 2y agoNotebooks: just use Marimo. They've fixed python notebooks.