By a similar argument to https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ , no one will beat Jane Street in a weekend.
Jane Street's hiring standards exceeds FAANG's.
This is a hiring/branding strategy. Good luck to them.
Jane Street's hiring standards exceeds FAANG's.
This is a hiring/branding strategy. Good luck to them.
As someone who has interviewed thrice and passed once, I disagree. Jane Street is extremely good at marketing themselves; before I ever worked there I received over $500 worth of "swag" (including a free iPad) just for attending talks and hiring events. The official recruiting strategy is grassroots where recruiters have anonymous reddit/hn/blind accounts to praise the company semi-anonymously. So you have a bunch of accounts posing as real employees or students talking up the company and the prestige of working there.
They sell exclusivity and mystery, but they definitely pay top of market salaries. I don't personally believe the actual interviews are any harder than top FAANG companies but they did seem to recruit exclusively from FAANG and/or top engineering schools.
I'd say the standard is arguably a lot higher, the things being tested are fairly different, more focussed on raw reasoning rather than specific techniques.
The main thing I'd say is that in general the standard of interviewing for FAANG isn't actually as high as people think it is.
Problems required knowledge of basic stats, general problem solving, critical thinking/reasoning, and all of it was wrapped in a nice package. Mind you, when I say "general problem solving", I don't mean brain teasers like "how many piano tuners there are in Manhattan" (I don't like that kind of problems at all).
I don't remember the details, but one problem was about estimating the most optimal move in a poker game given a specific situation at the table. The rules were explained in a very relevant and simple way to those not familiar with poker, which I wasn't at the time, and I didn't find that my lack of poker knowledge affected my ability to solve that problem at all (which is already an impressive feat, major credit to those who wrote that specific problem that way).
Zero memory of the rest of the problems, but most of them were relying on just basic stats and reasoning skills/critical thinking, no bs, and they were written/designed in such a way that it was interesting. The kind of a problem you would randomly see online in the middle of some discussion and won't be able to resist the temptation to stay glued to your computer screen until you solve it.
I expect in a constrained environment, someone on Kaggle will beat Jane Street's solution.
They have high hiring standard, but I suspect their 100s of smart engineers can't compete with the rest of the world.