What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
blog.janestreet.com
blog.janestreet.com
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?
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
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
Just don’t compare yourself with people that work at trading firms.
Instead, compare yourself with people that work in tech/FANG
Also, definitely not "in basically every way," but very specifically logical/mathematical intelligence.
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.
I guarantee you there is probably none, lol. I can't play an instrument, I can't lift, I can't run a marathon, haven't written a book, don't know a Presidential candidate - those are all normal things for the Jane Street that came from HYPSM or even the Google class of people, but extremely out of reach for people like me.
Out of bajillion googlers I personally know well outside of work, I know exactly one that knows a presidential candidate, and it has nothing to do with the school they went to (we both went to the same public college in the south). That's just one out of tons.
> I can't play an instrument, I can't lift, I can't run a marathon
No one is just naturally "good" or "talented" at those things. Those are all just skills that no one is good at (at first), and then they practice those, and then they get better. And yes, not everyone can be Michael Jordan, but I think the bar for "I am pretty good at basketball" is way below the MJ level. That would go for pretty much all of those things you listed. It is all a question of what you are personally interested in and why. Because if you hate playing an instrument just due to its nature, then you probably would find it really difficult to put the time in to get good at it.
How so? After several years at Amazon and several years of knowing people at other companies it’s apparent the ones at Amazon have a totally different standard of living - one without having Olympic medals (apparently Google publishes a list of Googler-olympians) or famous friends or ski trips. And they don’t even know people that do these things, even though it’s common at Google.
I didn’t even ever meet a Harvard grad when I was at Amazon - it’s hard to not meet one at Google or Jane Street (more so the later of course).
To remind you, I don’t know any and nobody I know knows anybody that knows a presidential candidate, but I go on Twitter for 5 minutes and see a Yale grad with 15 mutual with Vivek. It’s obvious there’s a big club of elites with accomplishments I can’t even dream of and I’m not in it or anywhere close to it.
And yeah, you gotta get good for all of those but everyone starts with some talents (and I have none). Ive been “lifting” for years with zero improvement (probably a protein thing but I’m also fat and vegetarian, the former is probably genetics too despite my failed attempts at starvation). I’ve been leetcoding for years with zero improvement. No matter what I do I’m still mediocre, still a failure no matter how much I work while everyone else gets ahead. What’s even the point of working hard if I’ve never gotten anything for it?
Nobody has ever been able to elucidate ways that I’ve ever accomplished anything, ever.
I met two at Microsoft and none at Google. It mattered exactly zero to anyone. Do you, like, just ask everyone at work which college they went to? Because I don't know that info for most of my coworkers, and neither do I care. Pretty certain that most people I work with don't know where I went to school either. The only times I even remember it being brought up front and forward was when we hosted interns, because duh, they go to school somewhere and they mention it.
> one without having Olympic medals (apparently Google publishes a list of Googler-olympians)
I personally don't know a single googler-olympian or know of one. I am sure they exist, as well as that list you are talking about, but this is literally something that no one cares about. 99.99% (probably even more) of googlers are not olympians and probably dont even know what that actually means.
> famous friends or ski trips
Famous friends - you assume they made those "famous friends" from working at a tech company as a regular engineer? And what even counts as "famous"? As for ski trips, my friends working across a bunch of companies (including amazon and noname companies) do it all the time. They just don't see the need to expose it all to everyone who isn't their actual irl friend.
> I go on Twitter for 5 minutes and see a Yale grad with 15 mutual with Vivek
Bro. Having twitter mutuals is not the same as being friends with someone. Also, I am pretty sure that bragging about being friends with Vivek (if you were one) is how one gets ostracised in a lot of circles. For a lot of people in tech, admitting to supporting him would be a social semi-suicide.
> Ive been “lifting” for years with zero improvement [...]. I’ve been leetcoding for years with zero improvement.
Get a personal trainer for at least a little bit, so that they can pinpoint what you might be doing wrong and teach you proper form and advise on nutrition. Something is going wrong somewhere, unless you suffer from one of the extremely rare diseases (e.g., some thyroid ones) or you figured out how to break the laws of physics or defy all that is currently known about human body.
Get a tutor or someone to study with using leetcode. Just throwing time at "practicing" things is a waste of time. Practice has to be mindful, and focused on improving specific aspects. If you practice a piano piece, you don't just go from start to finish over and over. You break it into chunks, focus on the problematic ones, figure out why they are problematic, train yourself in those areas, get better, then glue it all together. Just running a piece from start to finish over and over is a waste of time. Having a teacher, at least at first, would net you massive benefits. It is a night and day in terms of trying to get all the basics right on your own vs. with someone who can save you the time and anquish by pinpointing how and where you can improve.
> What’s even the point of working hard if I’ve never gotten anything for it?
Working hard isn't enough, working smart is.
I’ve considered a trainer but it doesn’t seem like it would be terribly effective if starving myself hasn’t worked. It really does kind of feel like I’m just a defective human if I’m so bad at everything.
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.
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.
> I make decent to good money (though I don't think most people on HN would agree lol)
Actually, HN might. HN is not exactly high compensation chasing.
My pay’s almost 3x median household income in my medium-sized US city, but is pathetic compared to what I see thrown around regularly as examples of lowish pay on HN.
2020-2022 high tech sector pay and huge profitability brought by the return of volatility also saw much higher base/bonus pay across the board, but the market really cooled down towards the end of 2022 longwise all the tech layoffs and HFT firm over hiring. I watched a few eye watering open offers fade away towards year end myself.
That’s why I love HN you always get to learn something new from other people’s experiences not always talking about the compensation and money
Elite schools only really matter for their reputation and for research (which is done at the grad level, not in undergrad).
It's not healthy, your sense of self-value seems to be completely tied to external perceptions and expectations. Answer to yourself: who are you, actually?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You're right that market bending is too abstract for most of us to appreciate the benefits, but markets abstract away the humans, too. I don't pretend that the industry ever knows when to stop making markets efficient and ask for regulation because they're making paperclips out of all of our savings. Whatever benefit they produce should be a tool wielded by boring technocrats.
As a contrived example: why is there a competitive market for efficient heat pumps, and a role for a "market lubricator" to profit like a logistics behemoth like Amazon, in formerly temperate climates? Climate instability and its human consequences. The good and the bad co-exist, and I'm not going to speculate any more than that.
Better than burning cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, I guess.
Sometimes feelings of inferiority like this are just a backdoor way to avoid having to put in that work.
Many of my colleagues and fellow interns were skilled programmers, but very few—if any—inherently possessed something that you or I don't have. The intern class was primarily composed of individuals with a curiosity for technology and circumstances that enabled their exploration.
I recognize the ease of feeling dissatisfied with one's own achievements; I doubt that receiving an offer from Jane Street for you or gaining admission into a elite school for myself would quell our insecurities. You've accomplished a lot, though I don't know how to help you recognize that.
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.
I can promise you this: you'll never hate yourself into positive self-worth, the same way you'll never fill a bucket by drilling a hole in the side.
"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.
> 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.
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.
try it I dare you. Whats the worst that could happen? Ask for feedback, be confident and open.
What a cool project that must have been.
I really need to find a way to focus on study so that I can apply for better jobs that actually do something.
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.
Another odd one is "fraught".