What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition
blog.janestreet.com
blog.janestreet.com
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.
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.
Many seniors would never be able to do the stuff in the OP.
In fact, historical evidence shows amply that the more competitive an industry, the less discrimination (of the sort that we talk about now, like on racial or ethnic grounds) is to be found; and the most regulated, monopolistic, or anti-competitive the field, the more such discrimination is found.
The quality level drops off very sharply after you go below the top 20-30 CS schools. It's just a matter of limited resources for recruiting. The common path taken by people who go to "lesser" schools is to grind really hard to get into a good MS or PhD program and then go to these firms.
Since I assume you didn't write it, I won't go into a point-by-point rebuttal of the points raised in this piece, but in the interest of keeping up the debate I will mention a few things.
Like many who think along these lines, there is a base fallacy assumed here by the author, which is that absent discrimination, the distribution of tech workers will resemble the distribution of the larger population. Perhaps it is the classical liberal tradition (that "all men are created equal") that leads us to believe this, but there is no reason to believe that any slice of the population must reflect the broader whole, no matter the subject at hand. Over half of the players in the NFL are black and only 0.1% Asian, out of about 13% and 6% of the general population respectively. About four-fifths of all cab drivers in the US are male. Billions of people enjoy running around the world and many millions compete in it, but the Kalenjin of Kenya comprise a stupid number of those at the very top levels of distance running. It's entirely plausible that Chinese, Indians, and Vietnamese (as mentioned) enter the profession at higher rates and succeed at higher rates than other groups without involving a cabal that favors them over other groups, or indeed even personal biases for or against.
This isn't to say that personal biases don't exist and the numerous anecdotes of objectionable behavior encountered by individuals who don't fit the typical "tech bro" mold are invalid. But words like "discrimination" must be precisely defined, and I favor one where it means legal or policy-based exclusion or subjugation of certain groups, contrasted against personal biases ("racism" when it comes to ethnic groups, "sexism" in gender, etc.). When older folks get fewer callbacks from interviews or women are seen as girlfriends at tech conferences, that's personal biases at play, but it is not the same thing as being discriminated against. When you conflate the two you head down a dangerous path that we're treading as a society now, which is the tendency towards totalitarian control of people's thoughts; and this cost must be weighed against any benefit.
It's interesting that the author specifically mentions the Townsend-Greenspan firm vis-a-vis the gender pay gap among economists, because that was a very example of where capitalists motivated by profit took advantage of the fact that women were paid less for equal work, hired such women for slightly more than their competition while still getting the same output, thereby both raising women economists' wages and making out with a handsome profit. It's an argument for letting the market play out. (I do question why the firm dissolved when Greenspan was appointed Fed chairman, instead of continuing on with their more competitive labor.)
This is getting long, so I'll conclude by reiterating what I see as two very salient points from the essay: "The market is just humans. It's humans all the way down", and "We can fix this, if we stop assuming the market will fix it for us".
Yes, the market is humans all the way down. The beauty of free markets is that it leaves the decision-making to the individual humans involved, and not an enlightened group of elites who think they can fix it by meddling. History is littered with examples of people who thought they can "fix this" and ended up making it worse -- so much so that we have a saying about it.
If you're interested in exploring this angle more, I'd be happy to point you to a few works in the literature who have made the argument way more clearly than I ever could.
Finance isn't a purely deductive field: you can't purely compete and reason your way past dumb luck and overwhelming access to liquidity. Institutional players have both, and are more than happy to hire their top performers' mediocre sons and nephews to keep them happy.
My college was a public state school (Georgia Tech). While it is a great school, it was public and affordable (could be done for nearly free in-state). But it definitely was not some super difficult to get into exclusive ivy club or the likes.
So it seems like they indeer attend a rather wide variety of schools, given the size of their company. But they aren't a mega giant like Microsoft/Amazon/etc. that can afford to directly send people to recruit from almost every school in the US, their headcount was under 1k total iirc, and significantly.
EDIT:
Some context for people unfamiliar with GA: GA Tech, historically, was the public engineering university for the state. For other public universities with engineering programs, most of them were distance versions of GT with students transferring to GT for the last couple years into the 00s (changed by the mid-00s with some students finishing at the host university but graduating with a degree from GT). UGA has only had a College of Engineering since 2012. But prior to that, since the 1930s, UGA had no major engineering program outside of agricultural and a couple other things, with the primary focus of engineering education in the state being at GT.
Other schools had other focuses, but not engineering until very recently.
...as opposed to give every person a fair chance based on merit.
There are some trading companies that do seem to legitimately do that kind of filtering (Two Sigma's application has a drop down menu for school with like 10 options and then "Other", DE Shaw asks for your SAT score, etc.). So I can see where the idea came from, but it's not true of JS.
I went to a crap school in India and a mediocre US school for my grad work, still got interviews at trading firms as a new grad and an industry hire. Currently working at one right now, so I can say that I have seen it first-hand.
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.
I'm not sure if people ITT are mixing up trading with engineering or projecting old Wall Street biases onto Jane Street, but it's just not true that they prioritize what school a SWE went to. I'm not claiming they pour recruiting resources into Mediocre U, but they don't automatically filter out any schools, and there aren't any schools that get an automatic interview either.
And most relevant here, any school bias that does exist is related much more to the CS department at that school than any kind of archaic prestige/exclusivity factor. Waterloo and CMU are among the most represented for SWEs there - very good schools but not exactly global brands.
Whew! I had four paid internships while I was at MIT and for two of them I got nothing meaningful accomplished. I learned a lot from that but for those two I was of no use to the companies.
Even decades later I still feel bad about that, so it's nice to think that nobody suffered as a result.
The statement that "talent is evenly distributed across the world, but opportunity is not" is very, very true.