What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

https://blog.janestreet.com/what-the-interns-have-wrought-2023/

by todsacerdoti • 3 years ago

149 93 3 years ago

blog.janestreet.com

Great article, one I wait for yearly.

Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street? It always irks me that they end each of these articles with a recruiting pitch, as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

Comparison is the thief of joy. Be better than who you were yesterday. Exceptional talent is also rare, don’t feel bad if you’re not exceptional. Billions will lead happy, fulfilling lives having not been.

laidoffamazon15• 3 years ago

That’s the trouble - I don’t think I’ve ever improved at anything after working at it. SATs, grades, technical abilities all pathetic after years of work, clearly unfocused and lacking because of inherent genetic defects or whatever.

Dudester230602• 3 years ago

Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street?

Would you not rather be whoever founded Jane Street and gets the largest profit share? Why aspire to be an expensive perfect instrument in someone else's hands?

LambdaComplex• 3 years ago

Because some people would rather be good engineers than be rich.

piva002• 3 years ago

Not everyone associates self-worth to monetary or financial reasons, it takes a quite quirky human (and culture) to give that much of your identity to money.

BazookaMusic• 3 years ago

Inferiority is how you frame it. You don't need to be Jane Street level to do good things in computer science or life. I've found a job where I do cool things on a compiler and I like it. I don't feel inferior to them, instead I feel inspired from these articles to learn cool stuff and build things I'm proud off.

I can say though that when I was working on stuff I enjoyed less (backend ERP stuff), I felt much worse and would compare myself to others a lot more. So I think these feelings you are expressing can sometimes be a manifestation of not being very satisfied with your own life.

strikelaserclaw2• 3 years ago

true, when you work on something you feel personally rewarded/challenged by, you rarely compare yourself to others, i think if you feel like your life is being wasted and you aren't living up to your potential then you start comparing yourself and feel bad.

chronic62141• 3 years ago

Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street?

Just don’t compare yourself with people that work at trading firms.

Instead, compare yourself with people that work in tech/FANG

laidoffamazon15• 3 years ago

I don’t think I compare well with 28 year olds at Google either to be honest!

Arbortheus• 3 years ago

90% (made up number) of tech jobs are just making CRUD apps anyway.

nicolashahn• 3 years ago

The people that attempt and fail their interviews settle for FAANG and are probably pretty happy. Most software engineers I've met don't even know about Jane Street.

Also, definitely not "in basically every way," but very specifically logical/mathematical intelligence.

wk_end• 3 years ago

Yep. I worked at JS, and there's plenty of ways you're probably "superior" to me.

Also, ~almost everyone I worked with at JS was brilliant and I don't say this to disparage anyone, even as engineers there were definitely blindspots.

Also also: please remember that SBF worked there too.

armchairhacker• 3 years ago

“objectively inferior” is rare if it happens at all. Maybe you’re resume will never be good enough in Jane Street’s eyes to get an interview, but unless you also write fintech in OCaml, I bet you’re better than the interns at some niche in software development.

These are young interns too. If you’re a senior dev, after a few months of learning OCaml and the popular open-source Jane Street libraries, you maybecould implement any one of these projects.

laidoffamazon15• 3 years ago

I dunno, 2 of these are at top CS schools that I can't get into, and most of their intern class is from Harvard/CMU/MIT/Stanford/Waterloo and the like. I think I might actually just be objectively inferior in all regards, not just technical or in software.

I've got ~5 years of full time experience, I make decent to good money (though I don't think most people on HN would agree lol) but I'm skeptical I could build these projects.

notsurenymore5• 3 years ago

but unless you also write fintech in OCaml, I bet you’re better than the interns at some niche in software development.

The difference of course is someone at Jane street could like match or exceed you at your niche if they cared, whereas the opposite is unlikely.

rvrs• 3 years ago

Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street?

I don't have to deal with this because I don't have a weird inferiority complex towards people who work at some trading firm. The people I know who work there are decent programmers, but as luck would have it I know good programmers outside of Jane Street as well.

laidoffamazon15• 3 years ago

I don't know any good developers in Jane Street because I don't know any Jane Street engineers. This is likely because I didn't go to a top school, because I am objectively inferior.

I know many people good at their craft. But I'm nowhere close to these interns in terms of ability, compensation or respect, and my life feels basically over at this point.

charred_patina• 3 years ago

how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane Street?

How do I deal with being inferior to Alexander the Great? You just acknowledge that you are you, with your own quirks and limitations. Being surrounded by people who appreciate you makes you not really care about comparisons.

darth_avocado• 3 years ago

Do an MBA and become the management layer of course.

notsurenymore5• 3 years ago

Hah, someone a while back showed me a Jane Street job that was apparently writing/maintaining a ton of VBA. Really curious what the interview process for that job looked like.

anon____• 3 years ago

Copying a comment of user cperciva from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411614:

more than once I was approached by people who wanted me to help implement their projects. But I have always refused just because I think I'm not good enough. [...] have you ever done that?

Absolutely. I'd say that 90% of the time that I've been offered consulting work, I've turned it down because I know it would require some skills -- web design, graphics, SQL, linux, ruby, C++, etc. -- which I know I don't have.

I have a reputation for being very good at what I do, and it is certainly true that there are some things I am very good at... but a large part of that is that I don't do the things which I'm not very good at.

how do you deal with self-doubt?

If you're a generalist, there's almost certainly going to be someone else who is a better generalist than you. If you specialize, it's not hard to find a niche in which you are one of the leading experts in the world -- because the group you're being compared against is losing the 99.9999% of people who never looked at that particular niche. So I'd recommend looking for a niche; because once you're the world's leading expert on something, it's pretty hard to doubt your competence in that area.

notsurenymore5• 3 years ago

How do you find a niche though. I can definitely go looking at jobs and find things that intrigue me, but they’re so rare, that if I waste my time trying to specialize, there will be no jobs by the time I’m “good enough”. I find it incredibly rare to see specialized work that isn’t very senior.

Most niches seem accidental, and most people I know who are highly skilled in a particular one are there solely because they were in the right place and the right, narrow time.

notsurenymore5• 3 years ago

At least you’re good enough to work in software period.

markus_zhang2• 3 years ago

I have the same feeling. I just have to fight every once a while.

jkestner2• 3 years ago

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make money off the next financial crisis.

xhevahir• 3 years ago

Seriously. They're in the business of finding ever more ingenious ways of shifting money from one party's pockets to another's. I can think of some important ways in which they are definitely not better than me despite their vastly more impressive technical skill.

latency-guy2• 3 years ago

As they should. Doing whatever one wants is the ideal.

dchftcs3• 3 years ago

One way to look at is that the more people who can figure out how to make money in a crisis without adding to said crisis, the less severe the crisis becomes. If someone can price distressed corporate bonds better, they will bid higher, and bagholders of companies that actually have decent prospects (but are hurt by market anomalies in crisis situations) can then lose less money, compared to the alternative.

As an analogy, imagine that your home is wrecked in a hurricane, but a scraps dealer is able to offer money for what's left. If there's only one scraps dealer around, they will absolutely rip you off and pay you just enough that you'd be livid and kicking but still aren't motivated to find a way to sell the scraps yourself. But if there are two scraps dealers competing for the wreckage, it'd be easier for you to get a market deal.

Scraps dealers improve their profitability by finding better ways to sell the scraps, so in a competitive environment, you could indirectly benefit from their experience. You make them sound like terrible people by saying they "make money off a disaster", but objectively their existence is a net benefit to the situation. One thing that can make this argument break down is that scraps companies may rely a lot on information asymmetry and price gouging, but that is actually less of problem for financial transactions that can be systematically electronified, where there's a lot of regulation and said regulation is more easily enforced.

Making markets efficient is a very abstract concept that people makes people feel disconnected from the benefits. But in this abstract way, it does contribute to the economy.

Not enough smart people thinking like Jane Street (or any large trading company with a track record of managing risk), but still performing financial activities, is arguably what causes financial crises to begin with. Think people buying into schemes based on returns that are too good to be true, bundling bad mortgages without modeling it properly, or banks not taking clients' money seriously.

rufus_foreman• 3 years ago

> The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make money off the next financial crisis

Better than burning cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, I guess.

-- https://poets.org/poem/howl-parts-i-ii

asdfman1233• 3 years ago

Lots of people get into places like Jane Street because they hustle and aren't necessarily any smarter than you.

Sometimes feelings of inferiority like this are just a backdoor way to avoid having to put in that work.

laidoffamazon15• 3 years ago

I've basically gotten nothing for my hustle lol (except a state school degree and working at Amazon, but I don't think that's considered "accomplished" to these types of people).

steego• 3 years ago

I know a few people from Jane Street so I can easily see why one might come to that conclusion, but I also appreciate your point. Comparing yourself against others can rob you in more than one way.

DiggyJohnson2• 3 years ago

There is always someone with something, for example talent or opportunity, that you don’t have or can’t have. I guess I was lucky to come to terms with “life’s no fair” at a young age.

That doesn’t mean I’m defeatist, I’m a very driven person, but it does allow me to be more realistic without becoming demotivated.

laidoffamazon15• 3 years ago

I think that's easier to say if you have a good sense of your own positives, but I don't think I have any.

runeblaze• 3 years ago

Be nice to yourself and challenge that thought of inferiority.

"Good enough for Jane Street" often means (much more than) having middle-class parents, decent upbringing, right tutor at the right time. I know people that are not "good enough" because they were never taught how to play the game right, who don't have parents polishing their resumes for them. Of course it still involves hard work and grit, but luck and the birth lottery plays a big role. Privilege wins in this world.

Besides, do well in big tech, use that as a stepping stone to trading firms is quite a viable path I heard.

samvher• 3 years ago

I can recommend the book "Learned Optimism" by Martin Seligman, maybe you can benefit from it. It definitely helped me work through feelings like this.

being objectively inferior, in basically every way

Maybe one reason that you feel like there is a big issue to deal with, is the way you're framing this. In your framing, the scope of your conclusion goes quite a bit beyond what you can actually logically deduce from the available information.

If we look at the facts, we have 152 interns who had resume and interview skills that were objectively more suited to landing an internship at Jane Street than your resume and interview skills are (presumably - it doesn't sound like you've tried, so we're not actually sure). These people have probably been preparing for this for a while, and while there is a degree of objectivity to the way Jane Street looks at incoming profiles, it's along very specific axes (probability of success in their fintech firm), and it's not perfectly objective. You're massively overstating the scope of this, they don't measure superiority/inferiority along all possible axes.

Then you might counter - no, it's not only about resume and interview skills: clearly the 3 projects described on this page are beyond what I could do as an intern, and maybe even beyond what I can do after a few years of working experience. That would be a fair point - but note that these are 3 out of 152 projects, selected to impress and inspire outsiders, and you don't know how much guidance these interns got from more experienced folks while working on this either. On top of that, many of these interns may have been actively programming since they're 10, so effectively they might have double the programming experience you have - in which case their results make perfect sense, and you just need more time to polish your skills. So extrapolating what you see here to the full set of projects and drawing far reaching conclusions about the interns based on this small sample is probably not justified.

I'm sure that these Jane Street folks are generally very good at what they do and that it would be inspiring to see them work. But I think you can give yourself more credit and spend a little bit of effort focusing on things that you're good at that aren't measured in Jane Street interviews, because it's likely that on those axes you'd generally compare favorably to most of the cohort.

frontman1988• 3 years ago

Nah I just pretend to pity them for working at a soul sucking job when with their 'superior' minds they could have been solving some real problems humanity faces.

fshbbdssbbgdd• 3 years ago

At one point in my life I was motivated in a special way, worked really hard, and got to be 99.9 percentile in a quantitative test. Now I’m just a decent coder and wouldn’t stand a chance at a Jane street interview. In my opinion, aptitude is necessary, but people who can pass those interviews are differentiated by a bunch of experience and focus, mental scaffolding that takes years to build. It looks like magic from outside, but it isn’t.

My point is you shouldn’t feel inferior, you’ve just been doing different things with your brain. What’s so great about trading anyway? It’s not a particularly efficient allocation of brainpower to society.

RugnirViking• 3 years ago

as if most of us would ever be good enough to even get an interview, much less get an offer.

try it I dare you. Whats the worst that could happen? Ask for feedback, be confident and open.

laidoffamazon15• 3 years ago

I did apply last time I was switching jobs and got a rejection within a few hours. Probably because of my undergrad and company.

up2isomorphism• 3 years ago

It is a query language, an impressive piece of work, but not something extraordinary.

chatmasta• 3 years ago

I always love these posts. Great job to the interns. Building a tokenizer with a handcrafted automaton instead of a regex sounds like a cool project. And I found it interesting that Jane Street has a frontend for interacting with different AI services and LLMs. I'm curious how that's used.

But to be honest, what surprised me most about that was that Jane Street cares about counting the token usage in its API calls. I can see why they would care if they were interacting with AI models at very large scales, but are they? They have billions of dollars, so it struck me as odd to see such concern for efficiency in what must be a very small cost center.

I wonder if the motivation is more about providing feedback to the users of the frontend tool, as they write their prompts, so they can gain an intuition for what makes an efficiently tokenized prompt? (So that when the day comes that they are running these prompts at scale, the token sizes really matter). Or maybe I'm imagining "prompts" wrong, and these are not just a few paragraphs of text, but actually 20,000+ tokens at a time, including data like e.g. pasted CSVs of trading history for the LLM to analyze?

gtoubassi• 3 years ago

Token counting is importing when you are injecting fetched data into the prompt to make sure you don't overflow the prompt size (e.g. in retrieval augmented generation). You want to give the LLM as many facts as will fit in the prompt to improve the quality of its response. So even with billions of dollars... token counting is a thing.

techbro92• 3 years ago

They might be analyzing sentiment with LLMs somehow. Which could be a larger scale task.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

They have billions of dollars, so it struck me as odd to see such concern for efficiency

You have it the wrong way around, it's because of that concern that they have billions of dollars. Obsessively making things a tiny bit more efficient is their business. Works both for software and for markets

charlie0• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the millionaire next door.

mtillman• 3 years ago

API costs are margin in trading and margin is everything. If you don’t have a way of managing that margin, you’re not a real trading firm. Pairing this type of execution with HFT would be their long term goal and that requires lots of feedback done in microseconds.

caddemon2• 3 years ago

Jane Street isn't an especially big player in HFT, though even with a longer timescale your overall point still stands.

user_named• 3 years ago

Different type of margin.

nvm0n2• 3 years ago

I thought the more interesting thing was that they're spending time writing custom tokenizers, regex automatons and logging frameworks at all, just so it can be in OCaml.

For the tokenizer they had three more obvious options:

1. Use a JavaScript lib and call it via FFI. Tokenization isn't a hard task.

2. Compile tiktoken to WASM and call it directly.

3. Stick with their Python server.

Writing a custom regex automaton in OCaml and then running it in the browser is surely the worst option. How does this make sense, outside of just arbitrarily writing more OCaml for the sake of it? The justification for not using their previous scheme is only that it's "grungy", without further explanation.

Every other project also seems to be like this. The justification for it boils down to nobody else using OCaml, so they need an intern army to reinvent all the wheels they're missing.

I mean, I'm sure the interns had fun and were paid well. But there's a post below by someone with a massive inferiority complex, stating that everyone is "objectively inferior" to the people at Jane Street. This post doesn't make me feel inferior, it makes me feel a sense of awe and wonder that Jane Street's traders are so profitable they can subsidise this kind of objectively excessive IT bloat. Even the author seems to recognize this, it says the post is by the guy who has "the dubious honor of having convinced the firm to start using OCaml".

caddemon2• 3 years ago

The primary purpose of an internship at most major companies is hiring - you can screen candidates much better before extending a full time offer and the candidates can also get a better read on how much they'd enjoy working there. Even the second order effect of drumming up hype for others to want to work there is probably more important to many internship programs than whatever the interns might tangibly produce.

At least I can say for sure that people at Google aren't shy about how it takes a few months to get up to speed with internal tooling and not much is actually expected from a summer intern. But they built themselves into a brand on campuses, which became so mainstream there was a stupid movie made about how fun it is supposed to be to intern at Google.

And as far as finance goes, trading interns aren't even legally allowed to trade, so I wouldn't be surprised if the culture surrounding internship at Jane Street just leans more heavily into this for SWEs as well.

GolDDranks• 3 years ago

TIL: "wrought" means about the same as "worked", but it has a more "tangible" sense to it, like doing some smithery/forgery.

bluefirebrand• 3 years ago

I've always thought of it as basically interchangeable with "created"

spondylosaurus• 3 years ago

Oh wow, is that where we get the term "wrought iron"? (Versus "cast iron," which is literally cast...)

jjtheblunt2• 3 years ago

I had years of germanic linguistics in undergrad and grad school, and i think this is an alternate ("archaic") past tense of work, so it's literally "worked", just like you said a blacksmith would do.

i mention the germanic classes because i can't at the moment think of other examples where (outside arabic etc) there's a commutativity between a consonant and vowel (work & wrokt) but i'd swear i would think of some if not trying.

euroderf• 3 years ago

Isn't it a form of "wreak" ?

Another odd one is "fraught".

mitchbob• 3 years ago

It was in the first official Morse code transmission. The title of the Jane Street piece is a play on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_hath_God_wrought

kaycebasques• 3 years ago

It is also originally a quote from the King James Bible. I'm sure your Wikipedia page mentions that but it's just too interesting not to mention explicitly here as well :)

asdfman1233• 3 years ago

They're not interchangeable of course, though. This article's title is meant to be playfully dramatic.

markus_zhang2• 3 years ago

Way more interested than all of my work combined :/

I really need to find a way to focus on study so that I can apply for better jobs that actually do something.

Zaheer• 3 years ago

Worth noting: Jane Street has one of the highest paying internship programs ($120/hr) along with other trading firms [1]. Their internships are extremely competitive.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/internships/

maxmcd• 3 years ago

Still fondly remember seeing the Jane Street intern post where someone implemented TCP/IP: https://blog.janestreet.com/what-the-interns-have-wrought-20...

What a cool project that must have been.

notsurenymore5• 3 years ago

I might actually care about programming again if I had the chance to work on things like that. Very cool, from an intern at that!

71a54xd• 3 years ago

Maybe I'm doing something wrong if the interns here are clearly 4x as skilled as I am lol

What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition

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