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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> The only founder still at the firm is Rob Granieri, but insiders say it is functionally run by roughly 30-40 senior executives in what kinda resembles an incredibly profitable anarchist commune. Or as Jane Street itself puts it:

> We operate as a functionally-organized structure consisting of various management and risk committees. Each committee is responsible for directing the overall strategy of the firm and for emphasizing the importance of risk management to our operations. Each of our trading desks and business units is run by equity unit holders who take an active role in managing our day-to-day operations [...]. Our management structure allows for effective cross-departmental communication [...].

Yes, that org structure full of hierarchical business units with distinct responsibilities and committees and subcommittees and overseers and risk management totally screams "anarchy"...

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The second definition of "anarchy" according to Google:

    > the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism.

Sounds like a perfect fit.

There is a CEO on top who has the power to fire anyone. There are department heads and middle managers. There is an org hierarchy. There are performance targets and reviews. Nothing about it is "voluntary cooperation". This is how every large company runs.

Especially this given how selective they are in hiring. There are likely hundreds of people salivating at the chance to replace you.

I hate, so much, when people refer to jobs as voluntary cooperation.

Maybe at the very top when you have more money than you’ll ever need, but for the vast majority of people jobs aren’t truly voluntary.

You won't enjoy my comment then :)

Yes, jobs are voluntary. The vast majority of people could choose not to have a job and not to entertain certain luxuries in life like having a roof over one's head or food on the table. Some even (voluntarily!) choose not to have a roof over their head because they don't like the idea of having a job.

Food is not a luxury. Defining things necessary for continued existence as luxuries is ridiculously reductive and is why defining jobs as “voluntary” in a world where access to those things is gated by having a job for most people is disingenuous.

Taking job A over job B could be described as voluntary but saying that you could just be homeless and scrounge food, especially in locations where the local government makes this illegal, so working is voluntary is just wrong

You are of course right that food is not a luxury, that was supposed to be slightly tongue in cheek.

One can still choose to disobey the local government and be homeless. I'm not saying it's an easy choice, nor am I saying it's easy to be homeless. I'm just saying it's a choice.

You’re right, I don’t like your comment. It always amazes me how heartless you libertarian types can be.

Food and a roof are basics, not a luxury. The fact that a significant number of people in this world don’t have those things speaks more to our failure to provide.

Do better.

I'm actually not a libertarian. I guess I'm your standard European socialist: I'm all good taxing (us) rich and providing for the poor.

It still is a choice whether one chooses to work, as evidenced by those who chose not to.

Edit: the "luxuries" was slightly tongue in cheek and perhaps didn't land well. Anyway, you're free to move to the wilderness, hunt/grow your own food, build your own shelter, and do without the socio-economic system altogether.

You could have fooled me because that is the same immature definition of voluntary and choice that libertarians espouse.

Voluntary is not binary. If someone put a gun to your head and told you to eat shit you technically have a choice but it's not much of choice is it?

> If someone put a gun to your head [...]

That would be a rather easy choice to make!

We aren't entitled to a roof over head and food etc, that's all I'm saying. We should be grateful when we happen to luck into circumstances (such as a job) that allow us to have roof/food. It's not something everyone has.

Saying we were involuntarily forced into having a job/roof/food feels very strange when compared with the people who weren't forced to have either of these three things.

We are entitled to a roof and food and it’s a tragedy that some people don’t have those things.

You’re not being empathetic by saying the opposite, you’re giving assholes with power an excuse to take those things away or make it harder to provide them to people.

I don’t understand why you’d say we’re being forced to have food and shelter, that makes no sense. We need food and shelter, which is why employment isn’t voluntary.

> We are entitled to a roof and food

What does that mean even?

> it’s a tragedy that some people don’t have those things.

Agreed.

> I don’t understand why you’d say we’re being forced to have food and shelter, that makes no sense.

I was trying to take your position to the absurd extreme. You said employment was not voluntary, I took that to mean that you're forced to have food and shelter.

> We need food and shelter, which is why employment isn’t voluntary.

I don't know how else to explain this to you. As an objective fact, there are people who choose not to work. They do without. Some of them even manage to lead fulfilling lives. How can you pretend it's not a choice?

Seriously? You're really doubling down on this argument that technically there are people who choose not to work?

What a stupid, disingenuous fucking argument. You realize for the vast majority of people, food and shelter are top priority right? This is the foundation of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

> What does that mean even?

Since I apparently need to explain the basics to you, entitled means "believing oneself to be inherently deserving". So yes, I think every human is entitled to food and shelter.

If socialism was a club, I'd take away your membership. Jesus christ.

> You realize for the vast majority of people, food and shelter are top priority right? This is the foundation of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

Yes, and that is exactly why they choose to work! Because they want to have shelter and food! What don't you understand here!

> entitled means "believing oneself to be inherently deserving"

You strike me as a rather entitled person. What does "deserving" even mean?

I wish we could all have shelter and food without working and can't wait for you to solve this rather pressing issue.

On the other hand, this is FT's interpretation. Obviously they're going to have a slightly different take on what "anarchist" and "commune" means.

no - fifty percent of managers control their employees through fear.. transparency and the magnitude of compensation and awards are different.. means of advancement are different.. overall "culture" is different..

Sure, every corporation is an anarchy then since no one is forced to work there, so it's all voluntary cooperation.

but the other part of the definition is also important: "without political institutions or hierarchical government; anarchism". So the typical corporation is not exactly an anarchy according to the definition.

Yeah, that doesn't exist. Any gathering of people are going to have political institutions whether they are codified or not. Similarly, there's going to be someone or some group of people who the others look to for direction. And whether or not it is codified, those people will form a layer of hierarchy for your "non" government.

Because people seem to think it's "politics" and "government" that are the problem. It's not. It's people. It's always been people. It will always be people. People are the problem. Failure to acknowledge that people can and will be shitty is going to doom your system before it starts.

Hierarchical organization, like political affiliation, is a spectrum.

I'd say that Jane Street would seem to be less hierarchical than others and thus more closely aligned to an anarchist collaborative.

(It's all relative, I suppose. Bernie is a "leftist" in the US and would probably be a centrist in Scandinavia)

> whether they are codified or not

Was it an intentional rhetorical device to brush past the important distinction?

Yes, there will always be more powerful cliques. This is Jo Freeman's The Tyranny of Structurelessness. But the point is specifically whether those cliques and hierarchies are encoded into formal committees or whether they remain fluid based on the desires of the group at any given moment.

If we avoid codifying the hierarchies, we get better distribution of information and resources, people are held responsible to those who delegated tasks to them, and responsibility can be rotated more freely.

You are describing an ideal, not what happens.

What really happens is that important information and resources get hoarded because that lets you control things. The only people "held responsible" are those you can convince others to punish arbitrarily. You'll create an entire shadow government the majority of the group has no knowledge of.

And showing how it worked within a group of 4 to 5 people is kind of useless. Lots of things work on small scales. The minute you scale to the point where you can't keep track of everyone, you're going to need an actual system in place to deal with everyone.

Yeah agreed. In fact, orgs that try to pretend like they have no hierarchy frequently have worse culture and higher employee turnover. See: Valve.

> Sounds like a perfect fit.

Sounds like a company.

"without political institutions or hierarchical government;"

Think when trying to translate a society to a corporation, then each of the terms must also be translated.

For a 'society' there is a government. And politics is dealing with the government policies, how we come up with rules.

But, if you want to translate to a corporation, you can't just say it doesn't have 'government and politics' because the corporation isn't dealing with the larger society. You need to also scale down the terms,

The CEO and the Hierarchy of bosses, are the 'Government' and 'political institutions' are the departments like HR, Marketing, and between them there are 'politics'.

There is no real 'anarchy' like individuals having freedom to 'just work on what they feel like'.

Thank you! I had to look it up, I did not knew English had tow definitions for Anarchy, I did not understood the parent comment.

Volunteer committees of execs is a standard management practice and not anarchy by any stretch of the imagination.

Honestly 40-50 years ago all of the big investment banks were partnerships and operated in much the same way. Partners owned equity and by today's standards they were relatively risk averse because it was their money to lose, with no stock price to pump up.

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