I think the author meant "could retire very comfortably in their 30s", and you're correct to point out that's not what it literally says.

But as for "could"? Shit you can do that at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta if you're in that league and start out of undergrad. In my experience (more than a few of my FAANG-era colleagues either came from or went to high-technology finance), people don't actually leave Google to go to Jane for the money (which is similar at the p99), if you're a baller willing to pull the hours you can make many millions a year in either place.

I think people go to high-technology finance because they want to test themselves against a harder class of problem in a more adversarial setting against people who feel the same.

That's anecdotal, but my sample size is more than two or three.

> I think people go to high-technology finance because they want to test themselves against a harder class of problem in a more adversarial setting against people who feel the same.

Maybe this is so at other finance firms, but my experience with developers who go to Jane Street is quite different. Because Jane Street heavily advertises OCaml as part of its recruiting strategy, I know many people who ended up there just because they wanted to program in OCaml while still getting FAANG comparable salaries. They don't care at all about finance (at least initially, maybe it becomes an acquired taste for some).

Allegedly they use it because it's "readable" by both tech and traders. I don't really buy that; I think the real reason is that one of the founders used it because they liked it, and now they have all this legacy stuff laying around that's too expensive/time consuming/risky to replace. I hear TGS is stuck with their Fortran stack precisely for this reason.

Having worked in HFT for well over a decade now, I'd say OCaml is more of a deterrent than helps in getting access to larger pool of talent.

Esoteric languages is often a good screener for good devs.

A large talent pool isn't necessarily a positive if you don't spend a lot of effort on your recruiting (mostly filtering) process. It really just increases the risk of bad hires.

This. If you want really good devs, they tend to play around with all sorts of things that don't necessarily have economical value. This includes esoteric programming languages.

I'm struggling to understand how OCaml reduces the risk of bad hires and other languages don't.

Languages large swaths of the industry know (Java, C#, JS, Python, etc) include a subset of people who learned it purely for the job opportunities but aren't competent developers. The number of people who learn more niche languages like an ML or Haskell has a far lower % of people of that type.

An example of a language that I could see shifting from one to the other pretty soon is Rust now that it could be a way in to many of the high paying big companies like Google, Amazon, etc.

I agree with this to some extent. However in case of firms like Jane or Citadel or Quadrature you have to have a well documented, long track record of accomplishments in various orgs before your CV lands on their desks.

These companies hire from a different pool than you described.

I don't know if that is true. As a new grad, I got invited to interview for Point72, Headlands Tech, HRT, Two Sigma. (although some of these are in a different "tier", and different business than Jane Street or Citadel).

I definitely didn't have more special accomplishments than 2 typical internships and both were not FAANG.

I should have been more specific in my trite original post. I think at the college hire / intern level, its not quite as useful as everyone is so green .. so people screen based on college / attempts at raw brainpower games with brain teaser puzzles and stuff.

On the more experienced end of the scale, I'm often surprised to see how many resumes with 3-5 years experience are basically Python-only. This, in the absence of something else in the resume that speaks to domain expertise or something.. its definitely a less exciting prospect to me.

The 2000s version of this were Java-only devs and people who acted as though we didn't need to know how the hardware worked anymore because Java abstracted it away. You see this attitude with some cloud/k8s type dev today.

In both situations, naively.. yes you don't need to understand much about the hardware for your basic implementations.

Arguably once you get into moderate levels of complexity you actually have higher cognitive overhead because you need to understand how the underlying hardware behaves and how the abstraction layers between you & it interplay..

I'm going to venture a prediction that knowing how computers really work isn't every going to go completely out of style, or even decrease in utility in absolute terms. It's already decreasing in utility in relative terms as more and more useful stuff becomes possible without it, but someone will always write the thing underneath the thing underneath the thing.

The AGI/singularity conversation aside of course, which I am not at all interested in having. ;)

While this may be true, JS explicitly says they don’t expect you to come in knowing Ocaml. So the filtering hypothesis doesn’t really hold.

That makes sense to me. But, in light of that, the ones who do go to Jane Street are relatively more likely to be interested in their tech stack and OCaml, as opposed to wanting to "test themselves" in the "adversarial setting" that the post I quoted describes. In contrast, the couple of people I know who went to HRT or Jump Street are much more like that description. They deliberately targeted HFT work, whereas Jane Street has more people who "fell into it" because of this outside interest.

I mean, Yaron used to go around a lot and give guest lectures about OCaml programming "in industry" at all sorts of functional programming courses in universities. I have to imagine they thereby recruited people who would have never considered HFT shops otherwise.

Jane Street recruits silly hard from Cornell’s CS dept because part of our required curriculum is functional programming w OCaml. They definitely introduce a lot of math/cs kids to the idea that finance can be a meaningful technical challenge instead of just Dyson bros in spreadsheets.

Then again I think one of the founders or top execs is an alum, so it’s possible Cornell has that course in that language because of Jane Street

There are a lot of universities doing functional programming in either Haskell or OCaml as part of their curriculum right now, so I don't know if that's really the reason.

Boy am I glad I never have to take 3110 again.

A larger talent pool isn't always better.

Every few months or so I run out of patience with C++ and wonder about the alternatives, of which there seem to be very few in HFT. Jane Street stands out for that reason. It's a smaller talent pool but I don't think it's a subset of those that the C++ shops can attract.

Rust is getting pretty popular among low latency firms. Many of my peers (myself included) would definitely show interest in a rust shop. OCaml - not so much.

> OCaml - not so much.

Is that only because OCaml has more of an FP flavor, or is it something else about the language?

> I think people go to high-technology finance because they want to test themselves against a harder class of problem in a more adversarial setting against people who feel the same.

That and among developers, I think Jane Street has hit "mythological status". I've known about Jane Street since I was an undergrad looking for internships and it was always talked about like: "oh yeah, that's where the REALLY smart people go to work". I think a little part of going to work there for everyone is figuratively one-upping your friends from college, you made to the place where geniuses worked.

> But as for "could"? Shit you can do that at Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta

Yes, these are some of the highest paying companies on the planet. Your statement is not a put-down of Jane Street.

Oh just to clarify, it was not my intention to put down Jane in the slightest. It's a fascinating firm in a fascinating field that is obviously full of elite mathematicians and technologists. I'd most likely be willing to work there.

> People who are driven and smart don't suddenly earn their first $5m go off and buy an annuity

I guess I must not be driven, because I would. Or at least something close enough to that. $5m just earning interest at 5%ish is way more income than I need to live the lifestyle I want.

I'd buy a few acres in the middle of no where, build a nice house, grow a big garden, raise my daughter as a nice family man and never work again.

Obligatory "Office Space" scene on "what would you do with a million dollars": https://youtu.be/4lmW2tZP2kU

The thing is, if you end up in a job that pays this well it’s because you’re either very lucky (and congrats to you) or you’re very passionate. If you’re in the latter category why would you retire when you’re being paid to do what you love?

> it’s because you’re either very lucky (and congrats to you) or you’re very passionate.

It's never because you're very passionate. Passion has basically no correlation with financial success. Millions of passionate artists, musicians, writers, and all of them broke as can be, most working shit jobs to pay the bills wishing they could just be passionate and make money from that. Passion is bullshit.

The real path to financial success is a combination of: being born to parents with the means and motivation to see you well education; being born lucky enough to be a little bit clever; being lucky to pick a career that makes a lot of money, often only by ignoring idiots who say 'follow your passion; putting in a lot of hard work to get good at something that is in-demand.

Or the usual answer: just being born wealthy and wouldn't-you-know-it you wound up wealthy too.

> Passion has basically no correlation with financial success.

Have you got any evidence for this? I would expect that passion correlates with hard work, and hard work seems to be necessary for success. I agree that many artists are passionate, but surely people can also be passionate about doing things like writing software or other activities that are valued highly in the market.

Do you have any evidence that it does?

We live in a culture that wishes passion lead to success. It's what we're taught as children here. It's what we want to be true.

And yet I find no strong evidence anywhere supporting the assertion that it does; just people claiming that it's up to those who doubt to disprove it.

Passion is a fairy tale adults tell each other because it's nicer than the reality that dumb luck and being born wealthy are the only real chances we have.

And those who were lucky or born on third base love to tell everyone it was because they were just so darned passionate.

A simple "no" would have been fine.... So, no strong evidence anywhere, huh? I'm gonna set myself a five-minute timer. "Passion" isn't well defined, so I'll look broadly. And I'll look for correlations rather than causation: it's hard to imagine a natural experiment that increased someone's passion. Let's hit G Scholar and search "passion and achievement".

Boom!

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-6494...

> The present paper reports two studies designed to test the Dualistic Model of Passion with regard to performance attainment in two fields of expertise. Results from both studies supported the Passion Model. Harmonious passion was shown to be a positive source of activity investment in that it directly predicted deliberate practice (Study 1) and positively predicted mastery goals which in turn positively predicted deliberate practice (Study 2). In turn, deliberate practice had a direct positive impact on performance attainment.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.110.C.1029-...

> The major purpose of this study was to test the hypothesized paths from dualistic passions through achievement goals to subjective vitality and performance in sports. 645 high school athletes participated. The proposed structural equation model, with relationships between dualistic passions and subjective vitality and sports performance mediated by achievement goals, fit the data well, especially for mastery-approach and performance-approach goals.

Probably best because of its wide scope and broad sample:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2016964118

> In three large-scale datasets representing adolescents from 59 societies across the globe, we find evidence of a systematic cultural variation in the relationship between passion and achievement. In individualistic societies, passion better predicts achievement and explains more variance in achievement outcomes. In collectivistic societies, passion still positively predicts achievement, but it is a much less powerful predictor.

This took me 3 minutes. I don't claim these studies are the last word on the subject. I just wish people were a bit more curious - passionate even - about checking their own beliefs.

i think extreme tails of "success distribution" gives a distort impression of odds.

Passions change. Also, I'd guess most CS grads going to work for JS aren't passionate about stock trading/market arbitrage - they're passionate about the pay or maybe OCaml, but the actual thing that JS does, probably not - it seems hard to be passionate about in and of itself (would someone work there for free because they were having so much fun?). And even if someone might be initially, they likely won't be after 5 years and enough money to retire on comfortably.

This isn’t true. It’s most likely because you went to an Ivy League school

Hence lucky to have been born to wealthy parents.

“ Look at all the rich people in the world, look at how old they are, and ask, are they retired? No! People who are driven and smart don't suddenly earn their first $5m go off and buy an annuity.”

No but having the freedom to start your own trading shop (or company) is hugely different than having to stick with a job you mostly don’t like to pay the bills

> Look at all the rich people in the world, look at how old they are, and ask, are they retired? No! People who are driven and smart don't suddenly earn their first $5m go off and buy an annuity. They're more likely to go off and found their own trading shop at 30 than they are to retire.

This kind of debate needs to be backed up by numbers or it won't be very productive. To get started we should know the percentage of millionaires in their 30s who are still working, and the ones who aren't working but are looking for a job.

Personally I can think of several things I would do with $5m other than buying an annuity. If you have that kind of money you are basically set for life if you make a few right choices.

Yes, all depends on how you spend your money. $5m will get you something decent in Manhattan, but you could live like a King somewhere else. I have a friend that retired off just over $1m as he moved back to his small hometown. House cost $30k, drives the same car for 15 years, lives frugally.

If you live in a place where a house costs $30k and on top of that you live frugally, you can probably retire with half of that already.

What would you do with $5m?

It is possible that people who chose to retire after they feel they have enough people to do it, would not be noticeably visible. Why spend time covering a guy who has retired and living a quiet life?

I think there is also a big question of what sort of spending habits these people have acquired. Their peers are making lot of money. And I doubt everyone is extremely frugal. Margin Call I think gave pretty good example how some in other firms might be spending their income.

Stepping down and just starting to live on annuity might not fit to what they have come to expect.

The relevant scene: https://youtu.be/xW1CrQu_H6E

Great film.

The culture of HFT (CS/JS/CHI.*/Optiver/IMC) is not 80/90/2000’s IB.

It's very, very common for rank and file prop traders to retire in their 30s. Some are ambitious and start their own firm or keep doing it, but many decide $10m/$50m/whatever is enough and leave the industry. They likely got into it just to make money, not because they loved it, so once you have enough, why keep going?