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Having worked in the quant industry outside of JS, and being good friends with a couple JS employees, I'm of the opinion that in 2025 ocaml is hurting JS more t
by markasoftware 1y ago
Having worked in the quant industry outside of JS, and being good friends with a couple JS employees, I'm of the opinion that in 2025 ocaml is hurting JS more than it helps them. Using an obscure programming language absolutely can help out your hiring effort at a small company; for example, I did an internship at quite possibly the only US-based company doing Common Lisp that hired undergrad interns. All my coworkers were extremely talented because (a) people who use Common Lisp are definitely PL enthusiasts rather than your typical FAANG-oriented CS college student and (b) without anywhere else to really go for an internship, they all ended up at this company and (c) they only needed a few interns so could afford to select only those who had prior common lisp experience.
But Jane Street is big enough now that 90%+ of their software hires aren't joining /because/ of ocaml, but in spite of it. The well of existing ocaml (or more generally, functional programming) enthusiasts who are qualified and willing to work for JS has been depleted for some time now. Rather than ocaml being a sort of shibboleth to hire only engineers who are passionate about programming languages, JS now hires the same sorts of engineers who would work at any other quant fund (ie, generally smart CS students who grinded C++, python, and leetcode questions in college), offers them slightly more money and a slightly nicer office than their competitors, and sends them all through a 2-week ocaml bootcamp.
but oh well, maybe ocaml is still worth it for the 10% of hires who actually are FP enthusiasts and would have otherwise gone into academia.
- delacy_essex 1y agoEhh idk I think there’s a sufficiently large group of people who like not just OCaml but also Rust, Haskell, Lisp, Elm, etc. It’s like a diaspora of programming language nerds.
- markasoftware 1y agoat least for the new grad pipeline, I'm gonna stick with 10% as my number for all PL enthusiasts combined.
- ekunazanu 1y ago> In 2025 ocaml is hurting JS more than it helps them Hurts them how though? Is there no other merit to OCaml other than serving (or having served) as a tool to filter out new hires?
- memalign 1y agoIt’s hurting them if the benefits are smaller than the cost of having so many employees start from 0 with the programming language. It can take months or even years to get really good with a language, especially a whole new paradigm like functional programming.
- sh34r 1y ago[flagged]
- markasoftware 1y agoI'm of the opinion that functional languages (and even just languages with strong type systems) are only useful insofar as the people using them are "cooperative" with those features. If you write ocaml as if it were Python (and if your total FP experience is a 2-week ocaml bootcamp, what else can you do?) rather than actually designing your project in a way that eg takes advantage of the strong type system to prevent invalid program states, the advantages dwindle.
- ekunazanu 1y agoI don't disagree, but I still feel that JS has a relatively low attrition rate and people there are more than competent to know the limits of their tools — that it ends up being a net positive in the long run. I wish there was a way to quantify if/when the benefits outweigh the costs.
- yawaramin 1y agoSure, and if you write Python as if it were Java and your total Python experience is a 2-week bootcamp, the advantages dwindle.
- yawaramin 1y agoJane Street is arguably the most successful trading firm in history. I want to hurt as badly as they're hurting!
- tromp 1y agoHow are they more successful than Renaissance Technologies?
- yawaramin 1y ago'Jane Street trading revenues nearly doubled in 2024 to more than $20bn' https://www.ft.com/content/24fea1d6-ba66-4b6b-814b-7bb72abfe58f https://www.ft.com/content/24fea1d6-ba66-4b6b-814b-7bb72abfe...
- markasoftware 1y agoRenaissance may have an unmatched PnL as a percentage, but jane street and Citadel, as market makers, just do way more volume than renaissance and their absolute PnLs are substantially greater than that of Renaissance.