For those who don't know, Jane Street is one of the best performing algorithmic trading firms on Wall Street. Probably the largest Ocaml shop on earth.<p>It's a lucrative job for strong programming talent. Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year (edit: after a few years).<p>They are similar to Two Sigma in tech focus and talent, which is a more well-known firm.
I completed the interview process at Jane Street last year and received a verbal offer after my on-site which they then proceeded to rescind while we were discussing pay ranges, claiming they had decided instead to fill the position I applied for with internal staff. Their recruiter handled it with a high degree of professionalism but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth nonetheless.
I know a guy who works at Jane Street; he was formerly one of the brightest undergrads at Caltech. He turned down an offer to do a PhD at Berkeley to take the Jane Street offer, IIRC. He is pretty idealistic and has an interesting philosophy about working in finance: he thinks moving money around isn't that societally valuable, but he donates 10-15% of his income to charity each year (I think he picks charities using the GiveWell/effective altruism methodology). In his view, the value of his lifetime charitable contributions exceeds the impact he could hope to have in pretty much any other field of endeavor, so the job is completely worth it.
Let me know if I'm wrong, but it seems like Jane Street is going contrary to the HN common belief that a lot of things should be "buy" instead of "build" and yet they are quite successful
Off a tangent but whenever I hear OCaml I can’t stop thinking about F#. I started dabbling in F# in my spare time but time didn’t allow a deepdive. From a few months of playing with it it seems like a solid alternative to other languages and codebases appears to be easier to follow though I never used it in the real world. Does anyone with real world experience have the patience to write about it? Does using F# make coding fun again? Also, does it look like F# will pick up in popularity anytime soon? Thanks
Wow. These interns at that comapany are working of stuff that's way more interesting and complex than the crap I deal with at my financial company.<p>From what others are saying, it looks like they pay way better too.