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Comment by typon | Hacker News Reader

This perception changed 5-7 years ago. I actually can't think of a single software company that induces the same level of awe in university students anymore. Places like Jane Street do but they aren't really Silicon Valley tech companies.

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Openai is probably the highest status employer among my network, but I don't know any university students

Deepmind is high status as well. However with both these companies - they are looking for experienced researchers usually rather than new grads. Google was famous for hiring bright eyed young geniuses and building their careers.

I've never heard of Jane Street before. It's kind of hard to have awe of a place you've never heard of. How did you hear of Jane Street?

Most recently due to FTX leadership being Jane Street alumni but they get mentioned a lot here due to OCaml.

They used to be quite a niche trading company, known in the functional language community for their use of OCaml. But they grew to one of the highest paying company in the world.

They've been on radar forever, but I used to work in finance and like Ocaml.

This profile in the times caught my interest

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/business/dealbook/a-new-b...

Jane Street is huge in HFT space. SBF started at Jane Street.

I work in the HFT space. Jane Street in not an HFT, they are not trading in a very latency sensitive asset class.

Jane Street did outreaches at MIT (dunno which other schools), wrote blog-like things, used an exotic language, paid a lot of money (word gets around), etc.

The Internship is now almost 10 years old. I almost wonder whether that had anything to do with it.

It's probably just size. People might believe a company of 20,000 is filled with geniuses, but it's hard to imagine a company of 200,000 filled the same way

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