[HN Gopher] What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
___________________________________________________________________
What the interns have wrought, 2023 edition
Author : todsacerdoti
Score : 53 points
Date : 2023-09-12 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.janestreet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.janestreet.com)
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| Great article, one I wait for yearly.
|
| 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.
| notsurenymore wrote:
| At least you're good enough to work in software period.
| rvrs wrote:
| >Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively
| inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that
| work at Jane Street?
|
| 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.
| charred_patina wrote:
| > how do others deal with being objectively inferior, in
| basically every way, to the types of people that work at Jane
| Street?
|
| 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.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I have the same feeling. I just have to fight every once a
| while.
| jkestner wrote:
| The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make
| money off the next financial crisis.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Comparison is the thief of joy. Be better than who you were
| yesterday. Exceptional talent is also rare, don't feel bad if
| you're not exceptional. Billions will lead happy, fulfilling
| lives having not been.
| Dudester230602 wrote:
| _> Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively
| inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that
| work at Jane Street?_
|
| 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?
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| Because some people would rather be good engineers than be
| rich.
| BazookaMusic wrote:
| Inferiority is how you frame it. You don't need to be Jane
| Street level to do good things in computer science or life.
| I've found a job where I do cool things on a compiler and I
| like it. I don't feel inferior to them, instead I feel inspired
| from these articles to learn cool stuff and build things I'm
| proud off.
|
| 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.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| true, when you work on something you feel personally
| rewarded/challenged by, you rarely compare yourself to
| others, i think if you feel like your life is being wasted
| and you aren't living up to your potential then you start
| comparing yourself and feel bad.
| chronic62141 wrote:
| > Relatedly - how do others deal with being objectively
| inferior, in basically every way, to the types of people that
| work at Jane Street?
|
| Just don't compare yourself with people that work at trading
| firms.
|
| Instead, compare yourself with people that work in tech/FANG
| Arbortheus wrote:
| 90% (made up number) of tech jobs are just making CRUD apps
| anyway.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Do an MBA and become the management layer of course.
| notsurenymore wrote:
| Hah, someone a while back showed me a Jane Street job that
| was apparently writing/maintaining a ton of VBA. Really
| curious what the interview process for that job looked like.
| nicolashahn wrote:
| The people that attempt and fail their interviews settle for
| FAANG and are probably pretty happy. Most software engineers
| I've met don't even know about Jane Street.
|
| Also, definitely not "in basically every way," but very
| specifically logical/mathematical intelligence.
| wk_end wrote:
| Yep. I worked at JS, and there's plenty of ways you're
| probably "superior" to me.
|
| 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.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| "objectively inferior" is rare if it happens at all. Maybe
| you're resume will never be good enough in Jane Street's eyes
| to get an interview, but unless you also write fintech in
| OCaml, I bet you're better than the interns at some niche in
| software development.
|
| 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.
| laidoffamazon wrote:
| I dunno, 2 of these are at top CS schools that I can't get
| into, and most of their intern class is from
| Harvard/CMU/MIT/Stanford/Waterloo and the like. I think I
| might actually just be objectively inferior in all regards,
| not just technical or in software.
|
| 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.
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| I think you should talk to a professional therapist.
|
| > 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.
| anon____ wrote:
| Copying a comment of user cperciva from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8411614:
|
| > 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.
| notsurenymore wrote:
| How do you find a niche though. I can definitely go looking
| at jobs and find things that intrigue me, but they're so
| rare, that if I waste my time trying to specialize, there
| will be no jobs by the time I'm "good enough". I find it
| incredibly rare to see specialized work that isn't _very_
| senior.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Way more interested than all of my work combined :/
|
| I really need to find a way to focus on study so that I can apply
| for better jobs that actually do something.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I always love these posts. Great job to the interns. Building a
| tokenizer with a handcrafted automaton instead of a regex sounds
| like a cool project. And I found it interesting that Jane Street
| has a frontend for interacting with different AI services and
| LLMs. I'm curious how that's used.
|
| 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?
| techbro92 wrote:
| They might be analyzing sentiment with LLMs somehow. Which
| could be a larger scale task.
| gtoubassi wrote:
| Token counting is importing when you are injecting fetched data
| into the prompt to make sure you don't overflow the prompt size
| (e.g. in retrieval augmented generation). You want to give the
| LLM as many facts as will fit in the prompt to improve the
| quality of its response. So even with billions of dollars...
| token counting is a thing.
| Zaheer wrote:
| Worth noting: Jane Street has one of the highest paying
| internship programs ($120/hr) along with other trading firms [1].
| Their internships are extremely competitive.
|
| [1] https://www.levels.fyi/internships/
| maxmcd wrote:
| Still fondly remember seeing the Jane Street intern post where
| someone implemented TCP/IP: https://blog.janestreet.com/what-the-
| interns-have-wrought-20...
|
| What a cool project that must have been.
| notsurenymore wrote:
| I might actually care about programming again if I had the
| chance to work on things like that. Very cool, from an intern
| at that!
| GolDDranks wrote:
| TIL: "wrought" means about the same as "worked", but it has a
| more "tangible" sense to it, like doing some smithery/forgery.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I've always thought of it as basically interchangeable with
| "created"
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| Oh wow, is that where we get the term "wrought iron"? (Versus
| "cast iron," which is literally _cast_...)
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| I had years of germanic linguistics in undergrad and grad
| school, and i think this is an alternate ("archaic") past tense
| of work, so it's literally "worked", just like you said a
| blacksmith would do.
|
| 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.
| mitchbob wrote:
| It was in the first official Morse code transmission. The title
| of the Jane Street piece is a play on this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_hath_God_wrought
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-09-12 23:00 UTC)