I am particularly fond of the assessment that Jane Street is a group of anarcho-capitalist syndicates disguised as a quantitative trading firm.

> They pay a LOT of money, have some high level of “nerd” prestige for solving interesting technical problems, have good outreach with things like problem of the month, and have not been impacted by massive layoffs.

I never heard of them.

If not for HN, I would never know they existed.

I don't think the remark about "nerd prestige" holds, but beyond that your points boil down to marketing.

And how an unknown company changed its hiring practices is hardly front page news.

Paying a lot of money and hard technical problems are not exactly marketing.

Like I said, they are relatively small but they are definitely not “unknown”. Out of curiosity, could you name any quantitative trading firm, or trading firms in general? You specifically may happen to just not be paying much attention to this sector.

Your ignorance of something does not mean the thing you are ignorant of is inconsequential

They are unknown because they choose to be unknown. The first rule of finance is that, you never tell anyone how you make money. Even more so if you make billions of dollars annually.