[HN Gopher] What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition
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What the interns have wrought, 2022 edition
Author : yminsky
Score : 81 points
Date : 2022-09-07 11:31 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.janestreet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.janestreet.com)
| Zaheer wrote:
| Fun fact: Jane Street interns get paid $96 / hr. They're one of
| the top paying internships! https://www.levels.fyi/internships/
| peterhadlaw wrote:
| Jane Street discriminates based on what school you went to,
| during their hiring practices.
| [deleted]
| maattdd wrote:
| Dunno about this, I did my MSc at McGill and got interviewed by
| Jane Street (twice).
| przemub wrote:
| That's a really good uni, no?
| dont__panic wrote:
| My understanding is that it's basically the Canadian
| Harvard. Is the reputation worse than I thought?
| physPop wrote:
| There's no such differentiation in Canadian universities.
| There's a few that are a bit better than others in some
| areas.
| tinalumfoil wrote:
| Software development is an outlier in that companies don't tend
| to care where you went to school. Lots of firms on Wall Street
| will only hire from a few schools, or sometimes even a single
| school. It makes sense Jane Street would be somewhere in
| between.
| screye wrote:
| The rub is that their discrimination practices seem to care
| more about prestige over quality of CS programs.
|
| 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.
| caddemon wrote:
| They don't discriminate against good public CS programs
| though? There are many interns from Berkeley for example.
| There also aren't that many SWE interns from e.g. Harvard -
| there are a lot of trading interns from HPY but that
| program recruits heavily from math departments, not just
| CS.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They are not discriminating by quality of CS program. They
| are using exclusivity of a school as a proxy for some
| combination of potential and pedigree.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| "Pedigree"
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| Jane Street likely has the highest applicant to available role
| ratio of any company in the world. I'm sure some heavy
| filtering is required, and probably useful.
| paxys wrote:
| Why exactly is that "discrimination" and not, you know, simple
| evaluation? Is every company that doesn't hire based on a
| random number generator discriminating?
| peterhadlaw wrote:
| if not in <list of blessed schools>: skip_interview_entirely
| return False
|
| ...as opposed to give every person a fair chance based on
| merit.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Real life has to deal with things like time and energy
| constraints.
| caddemon wrote:
| That's not Jane Street's process at all. I know first hand
| people from schools you've never even heard of that got
| internship offers, and I also know first hand people from
| MIT that got resume screened out. I'm not going to claim
| that there is no school bias at all, I don't know the finer
| details - but it's definitely not explicit as you describe.
| There are a lot of comments all over the internet
| (including this thread) from people at non-target schools
| that were interviewed.
|
| 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.
| peterhadlaw wrote:
| I have proof otherwise that can probably be replicated if
| need be. I can DM you the details. Granted this was a few
| years ago so hopefully they've matured since then.
| protomyth wrote:
| That's ok, some of the universities reject applications from PO
| Boxes or application fees paid with money orders. The filters
| work from a certain point of view, but I cannot help but wonder
| how much talent sits on the sidelines because nobody has time
| or the inclination to look.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Lots!
|
| The statement that "talent is evenly distributed across the
| world, but opportunity is not" is very, very true.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| I went to a school you never heard of, in a former communist
| country, and Jane Street was happy to interview me for
| internship (I didn't make it, sadly, but I can only blame my
| own lousy performance).
| mrweasel wrote:
| Why? That seems like a dumb way cutting of potentially very
| talented candidates. Seriously it removes over 90% of
| candidates, if not more. That seems unsound.
| mamonster wrote:
| You know there's a very well known joke that it's hard to get
| fired as a trader for underperforming the market by buying
| Apple, well it's hard to get blamed for hiring a bad intern
| if you hire him from MIT.
| gumby wrote:
| > well it's hard to get blamed for hiring a bad intern if
| you hire him from MIT.
|
| 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.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Their aim is not to hire every good candidate. Maybe they are
| fine with just 10% of the candidates if they could be top
| choice of good enough chunk of candidates.
| esoterica wrote:
| The goal is to hire efficiently, not hire every single
| qualified candidate. If 10% of MIT graduates are qualified
| but only 1% of graduates from a no-name school are qualified,
| why spend 10x the effort to try to recruit from the latter?
| mrweasel wrote:
| Given that they may only hire a handful of interns each
| year, then that actually makes sense.
| modernpink wrote:
| Many (most?) companies do. They make the tradeoff that the
| false negatives (those from non-targets who would be hired) are
| worth losing out on in favour of the smaller amount of
| applications to process because among that smaller pool they
| have a higher true positive (those from targets who do get
| hired). In stats/ML speak, they favour high precision [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall
| aketchum wrote:
| This seems fine. There are some schools where it is simply not
| worth allocating your finite amount of recruiting resources. It
| by no way means that there are not super smart people at those
| schools, just that the percentage of students that fit your
| hiring criteria is too low to justify spending time at those
| institutions.
| ausbah wrote:
| it's probably more like if your school isn't an ivy,
| stanford, mit, whatever you're resume goes right in the
| trash. also that logic is super self perpetuating and I
| imagine could be used to justify other worse forms of
| discrimination (not saying at Jane Street but in general)
| hpkuarg wrote:
| That's fine. Considering the business Jane Street engages
| in is highly competitive (maybe even the most competitive
| in the world), if their hiring practices cause them to have
| lower productivity, the market will force them to correct
| their practices or go out of business.
|
| 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.
| ausbah wrote:
| I highly doubt a multibillion company engaging in more
| widespread recruiting practices would be the difference
| between them succeeding and failing
| hpkuarg wrote:
| Why not? Having a company with multiple billions of
| dollars doesn't in itself produce any returns without
| high quality labor to work it, especially in competition
| against other such multi-billion dollar companies. It
| might not fail this quarter or next, but inevitably
| they'll be chased out, if in fact the recruiting
| practices lead to lower productivity.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| I think you grossly overestimate the percentage of
| candidates at lower tier schools who would be qualified
| to pass a Jane Street (or really any HFT firm) interview.
| Even at the top schools the pass rate is incredibly low.
| In expectation you would be getting probably <5% of your
| new graduate/intern class from the entire bottom 80% of
| schools.
|
| 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.
| ausbah wrote:
| to be upfront, I don't buy that a company with such large
| resources couldn't recruit from a larger pool of school.
| I'm also not under any illusion about the caliber of
| student at upper vs lower ranked schools, I see it as a
| matter of equity and meritocracy
| pyb wrote:
| A classic rebuttal : https://danluu.com/tech-
| discrimination/
| hpkuarg wrote:
| Thank you for pointing me to this -- apparently it's not
| so classic that I have read it already. ;-)
|
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Independent of Jane Street, this is absolutely not true
| of investment or finance as a whole: there are dozens of
| large firms where entire management layers are made up of
| the corporate equivalent of "legacy" admissions.
|
| 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.
| iskander wrote:
| I got an internship offer from Jane Street back when I was
| at NYU, so at the very least the criteria are (or used to
| be) broader.
| filoleg wrote:
| False. When I was in college, about 8 years ago, Jane
| Street not only hired from our school, they came to our
| career fair on regular. I interviewed with them myself at
| the time for an internship, but fumbled because my
| combinatorics knowledge was severely lacking at that time,
| and algo wasn't quite up to par either.
|
| 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.
| ausbah wrote:
| sorry my list should've included some public schools
| georgia tech or cal berkeley. my point they would be more
| preferential towards top tech schools
| Jtsummers wrote:
| GT is a top-5 engineering school in the US across many
| different disciplines, it's not just any public state
| school. A _lot_ of places recruit heavily from them that
| would be less interested in other state schools
| (including most other state schools in GA).
|
| 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.
| mxkopy wrote:
| When I was college shopping, Georgia Tech was near the
| top of the list for CS. I think it was actually at the
| top for robotics.
| heartbreak wrote:
| C'mon your counter example is that they recruit from
| Georgia Tech. How much recruiting does Jane Street do at
| UGA? George State? Spelman?
| hpkuarg wrote:
| There's about four thousand four-year-degree-granting
| institutions in this country. How much recruiting should
| Jane Street do at all of them?
| wyager wrote:
| Definitely not the case. I used to work there - lots of
| colleagues from outside the ivies etc. Lots of people who
| didn't go to college for CS, and in some cases did not go
| to a traditional college at all. Are there a lot of people
| from e.g. MIT? Yeah, because MIT is a good school and
| produces lots of people you want to hire.
| ausbah wrote:
| I think this is more in regards to university recruiting,
| especially with internships? I have no doubt about your
| experience with post grad hiring, college name doesn't
| matter as much after you have experience under your belt
| wyager wrote:
| I think in general smaller companies have to prioritize
| on-campus recruiting, but if you sent in your resume and
| you had some random no-name school (or a school that
| specialized in some completely unrelated industries), I
| doubt that would disadvantage you beyond the fact that it
| doesn't necessarily communicate much information to
| hiring staff who aren't familiar with it.
| [deleted]
| ecshafer wrote:
| When I graduated I interviewed with Jane Street and I graduated
| from essentially a no-name state school (Suny Oswego). I think
| I got a fair shake out of it.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| Hardly no-name: that's where Doug Lea teaches! I've been
| seeing Oswego on his papers forever.
| ecshafer wrote:
| dl is the exception I think.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| You're an exception. I also went to a SUNY school and I
| couldn't even tell you where Oswego was.
| oxff wrote:
| They have the only podcast worth a shit too.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| kahrl wrote:
| ?
| mwint wrote:
| Read the article, these are highly technical, generalized
| projects.
|
| That they were paid for by an investment firm and then released
| as OS means _we_ siphoned value out of the financial system.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| >That they were paid for by an investment firm and then
| released as OS means _we_ siphoned value out of the financial
| system.
|
| If you think they are getting paid to generate OS projects
| you aren't thinking about this very hard.
| mwint wrote:
| Well, Jane Street paid them to do work they presumably
| wouldn't otherwise have done, and that work appears to have
| made it into OS.
|
| So Jane Street's profiting from this work is irrelevant,
| they paid for it and we have it.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| "I stabbed this child but luckily during the surgery they
| needed to survive they found a malignant tumor so really
| I am benevolent and actually saved their life."
| pdpi wrote:
| They're getting paid as part of Jane Street's investment
| into their hiring pipeline. Then the internship projects
| got published as open source, which _also_ benefits their
| hiring pipeline. There 's nothing untoward about any of
| that.
|
| At the end of the day, they feed their hiring pipeline,
| interns get work experience and some cash, and we all get
| some genuinely interesting open source projects.
| Win/win/win.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Jane Street interns get paid very well. It's one of the few
| companies that probably actually compensate interns at the level
| of their output. These seem like cool projects. Good for the
| interns.
| Dig1t wrote:
| Pretty impressive projects, did they only have 3 interns though?
| ajkjk wrote:
| > And once again, the program was bigger than ever. We had 122
| dev interns globally, coming from 42 different schools and 13
| countries. As the program grows, it gets harder and harder to
| summarize it with any degree of fidelity by picking just three
| projects.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Is anyone else blown away by the level of talent in this younger
| cohort nowadays? We have interns and juniors doing solid mid
| level work.
| vsareto wrote:
| That's definitely senior-level work
| keepquestioning wrote:
| I wish this evil company would stop spamming the internet for PR.
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