What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

https://blog.janestreet.com/what-the-interns-have-wrought-2022/

by yminsky • 4 years ago

90 71 4 years ago

blog.janestreet.com

Jane Street discriminates based on what school you went to, during their hiring practices.

aketchum• 4 years ago

This seems fine. There are some schools where it is simply not worth allocating your finite amount of recruiting resources. It by no way means that there are not super smart people at those schools, just that the percentage of students that fit your hiring criteria is too low to justify spending time at those institutions.

ausbah5• 4 years ago

it's probably more like if your school isn't an ivy, stanford, mit, whatever you're resume goes right in the trash. also that logic is super self perpetuating and I imagine could be used to justify other worse forms of discrimination (not saying at Jane Street but in general)

paxys• 4 years ago

Why exactly is that "discrimination" and not, you know, simple evaluation? Is every company that doesn't hire based on a random number generator discriminating?

peterhadlaw3• 4 years ago

if not in <list of blessed schools>: skip_interview_entirely return False

...as opposed to give every person a fair chance based on merit.

tinalumfoil• 4 years ago

Software development is an outlier in that companies don't tend to care where you went to school. Lots of firms on Wall Street will only hire from a few schools, or sometimes even a single school. It makes sense Jane Street would be somewhere in between.

screye• 4 years ago

The rub is that their discrimination practices seem to care more about prestige over quality of CS programs.

Sure, go ahead and use quality of school as a filter, but don't go around discriminating against top public schools while accommodating what are honestly fairly mediocre CS programs at certain Ivies / prestige-private-schools.

mrweasel2• 4 years ago

Why? That seems like a dumb way cutting of potentially very talented candidates. Seriously it removes over 90% of candidates, if not more. That seems unsound.

mamonster• 4 years ago

You know there's a very well known joke that it's hard to get fired as a trader for underperforming the market by buying Apple, well it's hard to get blamed for hiring a bad intern if you hire him from MIT.

YetAnotherNick• 4 years ago

Their aim is not to hire every good candidate. Maybe they are fine with just 10% of the candidates if they could be top choice of good enough chunk of candidates.

esoterica• 4 years ago

The goal is to hire efficiently, not hire every single qualified candidate. If 10% of MIT graduates are qualified but only 1% of graduates from a no-name school are qualified, why spend 10x the effort to try to recruit from the latter?

22SAS4• 4 years ago

Jane Street gets a shit ton of applicants. Every slightly ambitious college grad applies there. Same for experienced roles, it's full of FAANG folks hoping to get in.

maattdd• 4 years ago

Dunno about this, I did my MSc at McGill and got interviewed by Jane Street (twice).

przemub• 4 years ago

That's a really good uni, no?

ecshafer2• 4 years ago

When I graduated I interviewed with Jane Street and I graduated from essentially a no-name state school (Suny Oswego). I think I got a fair shake out of it.

hn_go_brrrrr• 4 years ago

Hardly no-name: that's where Doug Lea teaches! I've been seeing Oswego on his papers forever.

modernpink• 4 years ago

Many (most?) companies do. They make the tradeoff that the false negatives (those from non-targets who would be hired) are worth losing out on in favour of the smaller amount of applications to process because among that smaller pool they have a higher true positive (those from targets who do get hired). In stats/ML speak, they favour high precision [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall

Spinnaker_• 4 years ago

Jane Street likely has the highest applicant to available role ratio of any company in the world. I'm sure some heavy filtering is required, and probably useful.

xyzzyz• 4 years ago

I went to a school you never heard of, in a former communist country, and Jane Street was happy to interview me for internship (I didn’t make it, sadly, but I can only blame my own lousy performance).

protomyth• 4 years ago

That's ok, some of the universities reject applications from PO Boxes or application fees paid with money orders. The filters work from a certain point of view, but I cannot help but wonder how much talent sits on the sidelines because nobody has time or the inclination to look.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 4 years ago

Lots!

The statement that "talent is evenly distributed across the world, but opportunity is not" is very, very true.

22SAS4• 4 years ago

I work in the HFT world. They might do it for new graduates, not so much after that.

AlwaysRock2• 4 years ago

Jane Street interns get paid very well. It's one of the few companies that probably actually compensate interns at the level of their output. These seem like cool projects. Good for the interns.

guywithahat• 4 years ago

No offense but just out of curiosity have you ever had interns working under you in the past?

AlwaysRock2• 4 years ago

I havnt managed them directly but I've worked closely with two. One who was pretty much the friend of the owner and pretty useless. One who was really incredible and got a return offer right away and finished a full project while there.

Obviously not all interns are equal. I guess I should have clarified that I meant at companies like Jane Street which have strong internship programs. They have difficult interview processes, pay very well, and interns actually do interesting work.

PragmaticPulp• 4 years ago

The high level of compensation for these specific interns reflects their high level of talent.

It's extremely difficult to get an internship at a company like this. These aren't run of the mill interns who are coasting through college and trying to check the internship box.

Dig1t• 4 years ago

Pretty impressive projects, did they only have 3 interns though?

ajkjk• 4 years ago

And once again, the program was bigger than ever. We had 122 dev interns globally, coming from 42 different schools and 13 countries. As the program grows, it gets harder and harder to summarize it with any degree of fidelity by picking just three projects.

Zaheer• 4 years ago

Fun fact: Jane Street interns get paid $96 / hr. They're one of the top paying internships! https://www.levels.fyi/internships/

rnk• 4 years ago

That is high pay - you interrupted my expected post of saying other companies pay well. Most big companies (faangs but not just them) I've worked in have paid interns pro-rated wages slightly below a minimum starting pay, so maybe the equivalent of 75k. But 96/hr is 200k annually. I agree that's very high pay for an intern. Do they pay beginning devs that much? And the next step is how much for a regular experienced dev.

jfrbfbreudh• 4 years ago

New grads start at ~$388k/yr. Every grad gets the same baseline offer.

ramesh31• 4 years ago

Is anyone else blown away by the level of talent in this younger cohort nowadays? We have interns and juniors doing solid mid level work.

vsareto• 4 years ago

That's definitely senior-level work

22SAS4• 4 years ago

Their interns are easily the top 1% of CS students in the US. Some of their interns who attend CMU already have OCaml experience, as CMU uses OCaml for their compilers course. Some of their interns have interned at other trading firms.

lupire2• 4 years ago

The OP stuff is brilliant (I guess) but it's small libraries. It's not "senior" work that manages a lot of complexity and deployment risk and $MM cost/benefit tradeoffs, it's hard/smart small work. Exactly what you want smart juniors to do.

Many seniors would never be able to do the stuff in the OP.

keepquestioning• 4 years ago

I wish this evil company would stop spamming the internet for PR.

oxff• 4 years ago

They have the only podcast worth a shit too.

apengwin• 4 years ago

bill simmons podcast is very good too

What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition

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