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Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by saghm on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:41AM (#50468078)
This is the third Jane Street-related thing I've seen on here this week after not seeing much about them that I can remember any time recently beforehand I'm aware of their use of OCaml and probably do other things that might be of interest to the HN community, but it seems like a lot in a very short time out of nowhere. Is there some sort of marketing push or something going on?
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by ontouchstart on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:46AM (#50468172)
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by MeetingsBrowser on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:49AM (#50468217)
Probably a self fulfilling prophecy.

Jane street news made it to the front page a couple times and got a lot of attention.

Now more people are recognizing the name and upvoting other Jane Street posts.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by dominotw on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:54AM (#50468324)
They are all kind of stupid too. dont see why this article is on frontpage.

They seem to belive in 'organic' marketing like doing a fake podcast on dwarkesh. So maybe they have some bots upvoting their name.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by chamomeal on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:56AM (#50468368)
They’re pretty techy, idk why they’re showing up recently though.

Also one of my absolute favorite programming talks ever was hosted by Jane street:

https://www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/algorithm-for-precisio...

It’s like half talk, half story. Got me super interested in logic programming, and minikanren in particular.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by vrmiguel on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:59AM (#50468431)
People like to talk about Jane Street because it is this Very High IQ™ company that pays people astronomical salaries and is extremely hard to get to.

They don't have to do marketing, though. It's not like they sell anything to Hacker News readers, they make their money trading finantial assets

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by saghm on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:20AM (#50468820)
You don't think that companies who want to hire engineers ever try to post stuff to Hacker News as a way to market themselves as a potential employer? Where did you get this impression of "Very High IQ" and "astronomical salaries"? I'm guessing at least part of it is from reading stuff from them or from talking to other people who read stuff from them.

The fact that you seem to adamantly disagree that there's any plausible angle here doesn't mean it's not marketing, but it might mean that it is marketing and that it's working on you.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by vrmiguel on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:37AM (#50469148)
> you seem to adamantly disagree

Such strong wording, you got that from me saying "They don't have to do marketing"?

> where did you get this impression of [...] "astronomical salaries"?

From the real world fact that the base salary is US$300k/yr, and often said that the total compensation for the first year ends up being US$700k+. Even for Manhattan + SWE jobs, surely that merits "astronomical". Other devs making that much are usually working at Anthropic or OpenAI, aren't they?

> where did you get this impression of [...] "Very High IQ"?

You didn't copy my ™ there, which was meant to be snarky.

In any case, what I was trying to say is that they don't have to do marketing in the usual sense. They don't have to get the Jane Street logo in your subconscious so you buy a Jane St. product when you go to Kroger's, and you can't sign a Jane St. subscription plan.

People in this thread seem to be implying that the company is botting/astroturfing, but for what? To maintain the image that they're a highly sought after employer?

Anything Paul Graham posts gets upvoted here instantly, because it's Paul Graham who posted it. For Jane Street there's the same halo effect, because many believe Jane Street's work is impressive. Is it really easier to believe the idea of botting to get an even longer list of candidates to interview, than it is to believe people just like to hear what this company has to say?

I don't ever see anyone saying Paul Graham is botting posts about his "essays"

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by saghm on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:11AM (#50469734)
> Such strong wording, you got that from me saying "They don't have to do marketing"?

The only alternative interpretation I can think of for what you said is "they waste resources on marketing they don't need to do". I didn't think that was more likely to be your intended meaning, but you're welcome to correct me on it.

> From the real world fact that the base salary is US$300k/yr, and often said that the total compensation for the first year ends up being US$700k+.

Can you clarify where these numbers are coming from? Real world facts tend to have sources that can verify them.

> In any case, what I was trying to say is that they don't have to do marketing in the usual sense. They don't have to get the Jane Street logo in your subconscious so you buy a Jane St. product when you go to Kroger's, and you can't sign a Jane St. subscription plan.

> People in this thread seem to be implying that the company is botting/astroturfing, but for what? To maintain the image that they're a highly sought after employer?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm implying. I honestly would have stated it explicitly in the first place, but I made the incorrect assumption that it was not controversial to claim that this phenomenon exists at least for some companies and that it can be described as a form of marketing.

> Anything Paul Graham posts gets upvoted here instantly, because it's Paul Graham who posted it. For Jane Street there's the same halo effect, because many believe Jane Street's work is impressive. Is it really easier to believe the idea of botting to get an even longer list of candidates to interview, than it is to believe people just like to hear what this company has to say?

> I don't ever see anyone saying Paul Graham is botting posts about his "essays"

If we were discussing this on a website originally created by Jane Street, I would find this a more compelling counterargument. That said, I also don't bother trying to discuss his writing much because I mostly find it insufferable. I find the motives of Jane Street to be more interesting precisely because my opinion on them is more malleable.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by vrmiguel on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:26AM (#50469954)
> Real world facts tend to have sources that can verify them.

Sure. What I said is a real world fact is the base salary, which can be verified by any of their job postings, e.g. www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/position/4274288002, where it says "Base salary is $300,000. Base salary is only one part of Jane Street total compensation, which includes an annual discretionary bonus".

The claim that has less direct sources is how much the TC ends up being. The figure I said is the one I've heard multiple times over, sometimes by JS employees themselves, so I assume it to be true

> If we were discussing this on a website originally created by Jane Street, I would find this a more compelling counterargument.

That's fair, but I used Graham just as an example of source that always gets upvotes here. Uncle Bob hasn't posted anything in a while, but if he did, it'd certainly trend here, so that might be a better example

> I find the motives of Jane Street to be more interesting precisely because my opinion on them is more malleable.

Yes, that's fair. I don't think it's impossible that JS would bot/astroturf like you're implying, I just don't think it's the case. By Occam's razor I find it's more likely that people do care for what they have to say, similar to P. Graham, Uncle Bob, or any sort of blogpost from Anthropic/OpenAI, etc. It's quite possible that they got to this stage due to intentional marketing, though, so I'll give you that

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by mancerayder on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:40AM (#50469204)
They sell employment to HN, is the parent comment's point.
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by dominotw on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:56PM (#50471359)
They indeed do marketing. I see their ads on lots of podcasts like dwarkesh.
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by myrmidon on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:20AM (#50468823)
I'd lean towards no on that. Might be a bit of a Baader-Meinhof thing. They've been mentioned/discussed on HN pretty regularly for years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=jane+street

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by spongebobism on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:56AM (#50469480)
According to algolia, there were 57 posts with jane street somewhere in the title or url in the last year, so a bit more than one per week. For a Poisson distribution with rate = 57/52, P(X >= 4) ~= 2.5%. So there should on average be ~5 weeks with 4 or more jane street related posts at that rate.

Probably just random fluctuation.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by saghm on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:04AM (#50469616)
I appreciate a data-focused response here! What I'm more curious about is how many of these reached the front page. My impression is that the rate of how often they reach the front page is probably a good amount lower than once a week, which I think makes the question of whether this is a coincidence or not more reasonable.
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by stuxnet79 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:50PM (#50471258)
This is the kind of pedantry I come into HN for. Poisson is such an under-utilized distribution for these kinds of phenomena.
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by tmoertel on Thursday November 12, 2026 @03:31PM (#50473774)
> Poisson is such an under-utilized distribution for these kinds of phenomena.

Yeah, Poisson distributions show up everywhere if you are paying attention. You can even use the theory as the basis for a fast, elegant algorithm to take parallel, weighted random samples. You can even do it in SQL!:

    SELECT *
    FROM Population
    WHERE weight > 0
    ORDER BY -LN(1.0 - RANDOM()) / weight
    LIMIT 100  -- Sample size.
For more on the Poission connection, see: https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql....
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by Karrot_Kream on Thursday November 12, 2026 @04:03PM (#50474244)
Isn't it a natural modeling choice? If your events arrive on exponentially distributed deltas, you end up having poisson arrival counts.
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by 8note on Thursday November 12, 2026 @06:42PM (#50476056)
possion distribution is what i learned in university for describing this kind of event?

the book is underutilized?

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by stuxnet79 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @06:46PM (#50476093)
No I learned it in university like most of us did but 10+ years in tech I have never once seen somebody reach out for it in situations like this one where it is a natural fit.

Few people understand it well, even though it's effectively a binomial distribution (easy to grok) but with special constraints.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by seizethecheese on Thursday November 12, 2026 @01:37PM (#50472013)
Except I'm pretty sure there are three from the last 24 hours. Two live on the front page right now and one about some almost flooding just dropped off.
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by fantasticsid on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:22PM (#50477278)
where does ~5 weeks come from?
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by Rexxar on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:09PM (#50478178)
I don't understand either. I would have said 1.3 (52 * 2.5%).
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by spongebobism on Friday November 13, 2026 @11:53AM (#50486215)
From bad math. 2.5% of 52 was the one thing I didn't plug into a calculator. Back to high school I guess
Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by TrackerFF on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:46AM (#50480857)
Working in quantitative finance (as a "quant") became the new big thing after main street discovered that those firms pay more than your usual big tech firms. It has explode the past few years.

Quant firms are also notorious for being some of the most selective in the world, so that alone has become a status symbol. The idea that if you land a job at firms like Jane Street, you must be some 150+ IQ math/physics/cs Olympiad machine.

Re:Jane Street – Our software engineering interviews are cha... by zodwick on Friday November 13, 2026 @06:52AM (#50482197)
I felt the same, so I did a bit of digging and you're right. Stories with "Jane Street" in the title or URL, via HN search:

  Year        Submitted   100+ points
  2014-2020   18-33/yr    2-7/yr
  2021        14          0
  2022        25          4
  2023        33          7
  2024        41          1
  2025        61          5
  2026        93          16   
Also notable: 3 of the 16 were this week.

Looks like two things:

1. them publishing a lot more programmer-facing material

2. more news coverage (SEBI ban, Terra suit, ...)

Don't know if it's a deliberate marketing push though, tbh.