> There is, as you can imagine, a lot of ground to cover. With 45 interns between our NY, London and Hong Kong offices, there were a lot of exciting projects.
Wait, we're leaving the defense of our realm against mystical incursion to interns?
Also the original Rust compiler was written in OCaml and the language draws inspiration from the same.
Also (perhaps this is encompassed by your statement already) there is ReasonML[0]. Switching over from the JS Quickstart to the OCaml Quickstart, one finds the very first line:
> Since Reason is just another syntax for OCaml, [...]
Side note: just finished a small project in ReasonML and it was a lovely experience. As someone who has been using Flow for gradually typed JS for a while now, I would totally recommend at least playing with it.
Not sure why the downvotes. There are plenty of sites depending on PHP that ensure a steady need for PHP developers. It may not be the highest paying jobs and it may not be located in the valley, but that's still a large market.
Yeah, even at the Amazon tier level nobody is looking for jobs by looking at language expertise...they're looking at algorithms and system design ability. They probably dont' care about what languages you already know.
PHP suffers from a contempt of the familiar. Lots of programmers of a certain age started off writing PHP poorly before they knew how to properly do their craft (in PHP or otherwise). When you mention PHP, the immediate association for some people is invariably going to be "that really bad PHP 3.5 site I made that one time." Leaving aside any positive or negative points to be made about the language itself, you're dealing with that.
On the other hand, if you work in a generally well regarded but less used language like OCaml IMO you're much more likely to trigger a "huh, I've been meaning to play around with that," or maybe a "gee, if you could pick up an ML while interning you must be pretty adaptable." The relative obscurity might even work in your favor if the person interviewing you is familiar with The Blub Paradox[0] and suspects OCaml might be higher up the language power continuum than the languages they know and you get cred for being a language wonk.
Certainly, but I'd guess that most of the people who worked at Jane Street are looking to work at places that also don't use PHP. Either that, or they're looking at jobs with hiring managers intelligent enough to realize that they can pick up a new language on the job.
Honestly, people who are looking for PHP programmers are not looking for me. It's not going to be a fulfilling experience for me, and I'm not going to be a great fit for their company culture.
(I'm in a "microservices architecture" (their word, not mine; I find it cringey, but eh) org where we're expected to deliver features as REST APIs, programming language be damned.)
I think this only applies where people have even heard of OCaml, Lisp, Paul Graham...etc. Most people will just think you're the crazy person off in left-field and not respect you for looking outside the box. Of course your mileage will vary. I think you have to remember that the average dev just thinks of software as a job, while someone on HN gets into the theory and philosophy of coding.
I'll grant that OCaml has a ghastly syntax that tries to be a pale imitation of mathematics but gets it even wronger than Haskell; that it has a lot of runtime overhead compared to C; and that what you gain for these sacrifices - namely a good combination of footgun protection and expressiveness - is also available elsewhere (Rust, Julia, Haskell, and to a lesser extent Scala and F#).
But I wouldn't call it "dead" per se. At worst, the knowledge easily transfers over to Haskell, Scala or F#. (Sadly these languages all abstract-away most of the knowledge needed to write good, fast Rust code.)
But more importantly ... to business's eyes, Rust is too immature, Scala and F# inherit all the billion-dollar mistakes from their parent VMs, Julia is a data-scientist's tinker-tool and Haskell is too great a paradigm-shift for most programmers. So OCaml is far from being "dead", let alone meriting death.
Couldn't Rust macros accomplish the same kinds of things as parametrized modules? Or am I totally misunderstanding how that feature of OCaml is used in the real world?
Basically no. The closest thing in rust is traits. But then this is like saying that Haskell basically has ocaml functors (functions from modules to modules) as typeclasses which isn’t true.
Some of what functors do can be done with typeclasses/traits. Eg a functor might take a module with a type and compare function and produce a type of maps fron that type. Meanwhile in Haskell/Rust you get the compare function from a typeclass/trait.
On the other hand you can only have one trait/typeclass implementation per type which requires newtype wrapper awkwardness if you want an alternative. Another problem is that traits tend to be basically small but functors can be big. Eg let’s say you want to write an application for transferring files over various protocols. You might implement a module per protocol which would include things like the type for the configuration, how to read the config, how to make a connection, how to pool connections, how to request a file, how to get chunks of it and so on. These things may not fit so well into a nice typeclass and some Haskell people certainly don’t like typeclasses that don’t correspond to mathematical things. In ocaml the file transferring program might be based on a fuynctor applied to each protocol.
A second thing rust/Haskell don’t have is a way to make a typeclass at runtime whereas one can do that in ocaml, e.g. it’s basically impossible to make a safe type for arithmetic mod n in Haskell/rust if n must be known at runtime. It is actually possible with Reflect in Haskell but that is horrific. It would be nice if one could do something like:
withMod : Integral a => a -> (forall b. (Integral b, Injects a b) => b -> c) -> c
withMod (m:a) f = f (Modm m) where
newtype Modm = Modm a
instance Num Modm where ...
instance Integral Modm where ...
instance Injects a Modm where
inject = Modm
But you can’t. On the other hand not having any way to implicitly know how to serialise or compare things in ocaml is sad.
> Want to elaborate that? Afaik, neither of them tries to imitate mathematics.
Generally speaking, "f x" instead of "f(x)" meaning function application, types not being able to serve as namespaces for functions, arguments' types in signatures being specified separately from their names, and most importantly the preference of first-class operator symbols over function- or method-calls.
* * * * *
For example, I find this much more difficult to read (from Hakyll):
-- | Sort pages chronologically. Uses the same method as 'dateField' for
-- extracting the date.
chronological :: MonadMetadata m, Traversable t => t (Item a) -> m (t (Item a))
chronological =
sortByM $ getItemUTC defaultTimeLocale . itemIdentifier
where
sortByM :: (Monad m, Traversable t, Ord k) => (a -> m k) -> t a -> m (t a)
sortByM f xs = liftM (map fst . sortBy (comparing snd)) $
mapM (\x -> liftM (x,) (f x)) xs
I think saying that “f x” is in any sense more mathematical than “f(x)” is stupid. Ask a mathematician and you may find they prefer “fx”, “f(x)”, “f[x]”, “xf”, “f.x”, “x.f” (does this make oop mathematical then?), or something else entirely. Perhaps they just write f and never mention x.
Using lots of operators is certainly something that could be seen as more mathematical but then I guess that makes APL much more mathematical than Haskell and ocaml and c++ and perl combined. I don’t think that counts as mathematical but it is a difference of style.
For specifying signatures this is surely a style thing. In type theory, types are normally put right next to the values and so in this respect Haskell and ocaml are not mathematical. I say this is a style thing as one can write types separately from variables, next to them, or not at all.
For “types not being a namespace” I’ll give you that criticism for Haskell (but also for C) and maybe for ocaml but recall the common idiom of calling all types “t” and putting them in their own modules with relevant functions. I don’t see how this is more mathematical.
My general complaint is that these aren’t differences on a more/less “mathematical” spectrum. The only mathematical things are that ocaml/Haskell are closer to lots of the fashionable PLT research than C and that research is certainly mathematical. Also Haskell people tend to fetishise category theory and abstract algebra so lots of the code that’s written is sort-of mathematical. Haskell also suffers from readability problems mainly due to the people who write Haskell and what they like rather than the language itself.
I'd argue that the typecasting in that last paragraph may not be realistic.
> But more importantly ... to business's eyes, Rust is too immature, Scala and F# inherit all the billion-dollar mistakes from their parent VMs, Julia is a data-scientist's tinker-tool and Haskell is too great a paradigm-shift for most programmers. So OCaml is far from being "dead", let alone meriting death.
In my previous business, we used Perl, C/C++, Julia, a little Python, and others. We aimed specifically for the best tool for the job. Rarely, if ever, did one language fit the bill, covering everything we need.
I've not used Ocaml, so I can't talk to this. I can state, emphatically, that julia is far more than you indicate. I am rust-curious, though haven't found a good reason to spend time with it at $dayjob. Similar for Perl6, and other more modern languages.
If you advocate a language for the sake of the language, rather than the set of problems you can efficiently express solutions to in that language, I'd argue you might be missing the point of the language. Paraphrasing Iverson on this, language and notation are tools for expressing thoughts. No single notation/language is perfect for all thoughts.
> I'd argue that the typecasting in that last paragraph may not be realistic.
Brutal reductionism is a beautiful tool for cutting away all the fluff; seeing where different things are really multiple sides of the same die; and asking the young excited pimply-faced advocate of the newest fad, a rhetorical "so what?".
It’s honestly really funny how a lot of people, even the folks on HN, have no idea how the elites live and how much better their lives are than the rest of us.
People that work at JS (and 5R and 2S and to a lesser extent FB and Google) have their pick of jobs because they are a hot commodity. The rest of us aren’t so lucky because we have no signal to suggest we are brilliant and likely don’t have the intellectual ability to pass similar coding interviews. It’s tough.
My life's fine and more importantly I sleep great at night and am proud to tell anyone what I do for work.
I've completely plateaued on the happiness vs money graph and you couldn't pay me enough at this point to take a job in the finance or defense industry.
Sadly I think I"m far from plateued on the happiness vs. money graph right now even while I work on consumer products used my millions around the world. I really don't make enough to live the elite lifestyle these people do at $145k tc.
I dunno, is drug abuse rampant at FB/Google/top startups? I have doubts. People there seem pretty happy (and sidenote, very photogenic) on their instagrams.
They don't post the bad photos onto instagram. You really need to figure this out or you're going to be chasing other people's dreams. All your comments just talk about how you want to make more money, when you're already making a lot of money.
At the risk of being judgemental without knowing you:
1) Are there really that many things you can't do in the world with that salary?
2) Are you choosing a fair group of people to compare yourself with? Yes, you may be at the ABSOLUTE BOTTOM of the top 5%, if you only look at the top 5%. Do you have any non software engineer peers?
>Are there really that many things you can't do in the world with that salary?
I can't save $1.5 million as fast as I want to with this salary (I know people who can live it up and still save $100k a year at Google and trading companies - I'll be lucky to hit $25k max).
>Do you have any non software engineer peers?
Yes. They're all in medical school. The rest I don't really have contact with anymore.
Sounds like you're in a bubble. My gf grew up in Silicon Valley and went to a prestigious engineering school, and all the people she knows are doctors, lawyers, or engineers. But that's a bubble and an unnecessary rat race. She's often worrying that she's not accomplishing enough in life.
I on the other hand, grew up in a tiny rural town, went to the cheapest state school possible, and now make a healthy 6 figure salary at a no-name company. I don't feel the need to compare myself to anyone; but if I do it's with gratitude. I grew up with people who are now farmers and bakers and baristas and minor fiction authors.
You can choose to compare yourself with people above you, or see how far and healthy you are in the grand scheme of things. Of course that's up to you. If you want to dream big, go for it! Just don't come off as whiny, it's annoying to the rest of the 90% that is be low you on the totem pole.
You ever hear of "early retirement extreme" (don't be scared by the cheesy misleading name, it's probably the lowest quality part of the blog/book). I discovered it in my mid 20's and wish I did earlier.
I could go on and on about it, and I won't even drop numbers because you won't believe them. The author is a physics PhD and discusses topics very logically and steps back critically analyzes many common cultural behaviors and preconceived notions (what IS retirement, for example) that can help you think about what you really want and the best way to get there.
Judge for yourself but I think his life is a lot more interesting than rich tech kids buying exclusive turnkey vacation packages w/guaranteed great instagram backdrops. Example, walking the docks and joining a sailboat racing team, training for 100 mile bike races, etc.
There's really too much to write here to describe the full philosophy lifestyle, but I encourage you to at least check it out with an open mind. I guarantee you it's not "frugal living", the guy probably has nicer stuff than most people when it comes to clothes, bikes, tools, etc.
Honestly reading your posts in this thread I can tell we're so wildly different when it comes to values that I don't really know if this will resonate with you or not, but again I at least encourage you to check it out, just to see other options for whats out there.
I will go ahead and spoil the "end" of the guy's personal journey, since I think you might be especially interested: Despite having investments that generate over 100% of living expenses, and not having to do anything for anyone, getting to do whatever you want all day, the ends up taking a job as "quant trader/researcher" for the opportunity to solve challenging problems.
Yea, you probably can if you want and don't give up.
It's not apparent to me if you want to be a quant, or you want a job that earns a lot of money and is considered prestigious by a certain group of people.
If you had the passion for being a quant regardless of the money, you could be learning and programming in your free time.
If you want the job title more than you enjoy the activity, then I'm sure you could keep studying and practicing and get the job, but I don't think you'll find it satisfying.
If you merely want money for quality of life, stability, security, having F-U money, or anything along those lines, then I'd really want to stress that there are two areas you can work on to achieve that goal. One is earning more money and you seem very focused on that. The other is becoming more efficient with your life. At any point you can make the realization that you've hit a point of diminishing returns in either area, and focus on something else.
I'm not in your shoes, but w/ a salary of 145k at 22 years old, I think you can make the pieces fit to retire in about ~10 years, while spending plenty of money on recreation along the way. Alternatively, I'm sure you can rent/buy/subscribe enough that you spend the next 10 years living paycheck to paycheck. Lifestyle is yours to choose.
It would be cool to start seeing more of this from other companies. Also, I wonder if anyone has done an extensive cost-benefit analysis of using OCaml instead of a more common language. It seems like the training and cost of always needing to build your own frameworks would be exceptionally high.
Why "exceptionally" high? The programmers you are hiring are (or should be!) bright, they learn new things fast, and OCaml is not very difficult to learn.
At any software company you have to learn new things. Every company has its internal development stack and custom software, unless the company literally isn't a software company at all or is doing something so unoriginal and dull that you wouldn't want to work there.
>>> and [any language] is not very difficult to learn.
I'm all for training and learning, but pretending that anything can be picked up quickly and easily is just wrong, especially in a trading environment.
Any typo or bug is going to cost millions of dollars, it's very hostile to newcomers. They will be struggling enough to learn about finance and the company.
It seems like the training and cost of always needing to build your own frameworks would be exceptionally high
It is purely a matter of volume - are you doing enough business to make it worthwhile?
The last company I worked for had in-house database, programming language, IDE for that language, version control system, job scheduler... At the time they started doing that there was nothing available that did what they needed, and even now, their stack does things that I'm not sure I've seen outside, tho' 10 years on it's less clear that it would be worth starting a project like that from scratch now.
Remember, in business, there are no concepts of "cheap" or "expensive", there is only "worth it" or "not".
Care to expand? Their contributions seem pretty interesting and important to me, and improving the financial market is not a bullshit nor trivial task at all.
OCaml is a ML language with many concepts directly translateable to what you would consider to be "hip" language. swift, reason, clojure. These interns are given technically meaningful work instead of pushing sql/json around. I would hire any of these interns in a heartbeat.
In grad school it made me so sad to know brilliant undergrads with progressive political views go to work in corporate tech/finance afterwards because they perceived that was what everyone else does, and to afford their aspirational lifestyles.
Edit: It's potentially productive if they open source some of their new stuff? I'm guessing the whole point is that the firm is developing its competitive edge.
> Edit: It's potentially productive if they open source some of their new stuff? I'm guessing the whole point is that the firm is developing its competitive edge.
In a way, it's even productive if the workers at Jane Street just get to do something they enjoy. But it's odd to judge a company by its by-products.
I motion to make this sort of empty ideological criticism against the HN guidelines. It should be a formal logical fallacy to critique the economic activity of other people just because they're choosing not to engage in whatever your favorite flavor of saving the world entails.
There's no effort expended nor insight contributed. It always follows a simple formula: woe to the world that all these {brilliant scientists, talented engineers} decide to work in {high frequency trading, advertising, data mining} when they could be working on {curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}.
If you're not well enough acquainted with economic theory to appreciate why financial markets are at least somewhat useful then that's your problem, not anyone else's. Don't try to insinuate that society has lost something because some very capable people have decided to engage in work you won't even take the time to understand.
It's simply disrespectful. You have no idea what precise benefits their work contributes to society. You also have no idea what kind of charitable work they like to do in their free time or what kind if philanthropy their salaries allow them to contribute to the world. And this is all beside the fact that there are many secondary benefits of a company flush with money releasing excellent open source software and stewarding programming language development.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. It never leads to any meaningful discussion or interesting ideas. It's one of the cheapest arguments one can make and it's a type of argument that doesn't deserve engagement with.
I would welcome a rule against empty arguments like this on HN.
CC: dang, is there any version of this that we can perhaps institute?
I’m not sure you understand what logical fallacies are (but I understand HN loves to trot them out, so I’m not surprised). Anyway, nobody seconded your silly motion, so it died.
> It should be a formal logical fallacy to critique the economic activity of other people just because they're choosing not to engage in whatever your favorite flavor of saving the world entails.
It should be a formal logical fallacy to pretend there is no difference between "not saving the world in someone's favorite flavor" and "doing something useless".
> It always follows a simple formula: woe to the world that all these {brilliant scientists, talented engineers} decide to work in {high frequency trading, advertising, data mining} when they could be working on {curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}.
In order to be intellectually honest, you should replace the strawman "{curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}" by "anything useful".
> If you're not well enough acquainted with economic theory to appreciate why financial markets are at least somewhat useful then that's your problem, not anyone else's. Don't try to insinuate that society has lost something because some very capable people have decided to engage in work you won't even take the time to understand.
There's no effort expended nor insight contributed here either. You not just refused to make an argument, you baselessly claimed that OP considers the work of Jane Street useless because they are stupid and not for reasons you don't even take the time to understand. That is simply disrespectful.
Also, the statements "developing software to gather more money from the financial markets is useless" and "financial markets are useless" are not equivalent. No one claimed the latter.
> It's simply disrespectful.
There is no reason to respect useless work.
> You also have no idea what kind of charitable work they like to do in their free time or what kind if philanthropy their salaries allow them to contribute to the world.
They didn't say anything about what the workers at Jane Street do with their free time.
> And this is all beside the fact that there are many secondary effects of company flush with money releasing excellent open source software and stewarding programming language development.
That is merely a by-product. Also, it may very well be compensated by the fact that if Jane Street didn't have that money, someone else would.
This reasoning leads to praising blackhat SEO, spammers, ICO scammers, etc. I'm sure they do plenty of technically clever things. And they also make plenty of money, therefore via economic theory they're a valuable asset to our community, unlike those marginally useless teachers and social workers.
My reasoning doesn't lead to anything you've mentioned. Your characterization of what I said is so uncharitable it's difficult for me to believe you're engaging with my point honestly and in good faith. However...assuming you've honestly trying to discuss this: you're mistaking my real point for support of maximal capitalism.
I'm not saying the intrinsic "worth" of an individual or a company to society is determined by how much profit they generate. That may or may not be the case, but it's a sideshow to what I'm really talking about. I'm saying that it's disrespectful and intellectually lazy to dismiss someone else's work (and implicitly, any fulfillment they may derive from it) because it's technically challenging but not saving the world. It's also implicitly narcissistic, because it makes the critic an ideological arbiter of the worth of other people's professions. The critic should spend more time focusing on being the change they want to see in the world rather than griefing the work of other people.
The examples you provided - blackhat SEO, ICO scammers, spam - are criminal behaviors that undermine society. The examples I used in my template are not. They can cause harm, like most activities, but they are not designed specifically to do so. That makes your examples incomparable as a rebuttal.
At this point it's likely that someone will be incensed by this last point and jump in with a lovely deconstruction of advertising or financial trading that asserts, "No, it actually is a net negative for society!" I'm not going to engage in debating that point because it's not going to go anywhere and it's not directly relevant to my point. Armchair economists have been reinventing "better" financial theory from first principles for years on Hacker News, and focusing on that particular example is a red herring.
Thank you for the response and engaging with me. I'm sorry you were insulted, I should have written a longer reply and left less room for reading between the lines.
I'd really enjoy diving a little deeper into this, and really hope I'm not coming across as combative.
Take the "blackhat" away from SEO, take the "scam" away from ICO, replace "spam" with "effective viral marketers". All of those are technically challenging but not necessarily changing the world. By your reply's 2nd paragraph, I'm assuming you will withhold judgement on these individuals/professions?
Otherwise, would you mind explaining the distinction? The only difference I see is Jane St et al are established with massive amounts of capital, vs being the little guy. I don't wish to offend you again but it seems by calling them criminal/detriment to society you are passing the same judgement that I am on large financial firms?
Aren't high frequency traders and big funds always toeing the line between legitimate behavior market manipulation?
Finally, call me narcissistic if you wish but I am a human not a Vulcan. I can't help pass judgement and say those who willingly pass up easy money to selflessly do poorly compensated hard work to help those less fortunate and make society a more harmonious place DO deserve my praise more than some interns on the way to potentially being the next Martin Shrekli. I think the world needs more of these people and they're certainly not being compensated with money so I want to do what I can to compensate them with social capital.
And finally, I'll repeat that I don't mean to troll or cause offense to you. I'm gracious for the opportunity to engage with you and learn different opinions rather than stay in my echo chamber/filter bubble.
Advertising and Facebook-style spyware deployment[0] are behaviors that undermine society, and are only not criminal due to blatant goverment corruption and, if you want to be overly charitable, being too novel for law to have caught up with. They may not be designed for the express purpose of causing harm, but neither are blackhat SEO, or, for example, shoplifting.
Ironically, your original point was a good one; high frequency trading is fairly clearly positive and certainly not inherently negative. (I don't think anyone believes they're making optimal use of their talents for the betterment of humanity or whatever similar goal, but that's a unreasonably high standard when we're also discussing advertisers and SEO.)
0: Which is what people I've talked to use "data mining" to refer to, although I'm not sure if that's what you meant.
You've broken the site guidelines, which ask: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work."
You also broke the one that asks commenters not to be snarky. Even if you're 100% right, that's no reason to be a jerk; in fact it does double harm because now you've discredited the truth.
Where the interns paid, at a market rate? This seems like legal documentation demonstrating that they were working on core development for the firm. So without fair pay, that is illegal is it not?
Of course they were fairly paid. Probably at least 80k/yr amortized for their work. At least that is how it happens at every other big tech company, and I'm sure if you can intern at jane street you can intern at amazon et al.
I've met smart people at dumb companies and dumb people at smart companies (and schools). The more experience I have working with the most respected people and organizations, the more evidence I discover that reputation is more corellated with happenstance than with merit.
I've worked at small and larger companies and there are brilliant people on all levels (if anything I was more impressed with some of the experienced engineers at my first company that nobody has ever heard of than my last company). Nonetheless, if I were to put myself in the shoes of a brilliant USAMO medalist who goes to MIT and interned at Jane Street starting my sophomore year, I doubt I'd see the difference or be internally charitable towards those who weren't born as gifted or persistent as myself. They would be $90k a year humans, not $250k+ a year humans like myself.
If the elites are stereotyping me, I don't see anything wrong with stereotyping them.
Jane Street pays interns a little more than $60/hr. Pretty competitive. Definitely in line with unicorns and big tech ($50/hr @ FB and AirBnb, $45 @ Apple, etc)
Airbnb is ~$40 an hour but they have unlimited overtime.
From what I've heard Apple starts at $38 an hour.
FB isn't hourly, it's $8k a month.
Amazon is $7.725k a month or $7.2k if you take corporate housing. It's more in California and NYC - $8.4k a month, or $7.9k if you take corporate housing.
I was told Amazon interns also had to pay $300/mo for not particularly nice corporate housing in the UW dorms. My understanding was this was in additional to the salary reduction.
Nope, its only a salary reduction. In addition, they get a "husky card" with a daily stipend for on-campus dining hall/food court meals/gym entrance etc - a few friends of mine took it and they said the value of the husky card was more than $300 if they spent all of it.
Also, UW Dorms are only for summer interns. Off cycle interns live in 1 bedroom apartments in SLU. They're really nice with a $500 salary reduction.
What tech interns do at trading companies, especially JS, always amazes me. Not because of the complexity of the problem domain but rather the rigor of the solution.
Something like Tristan Hume's famous blog post [0] on Tree Diffing would be unthinkable at Amazon, or most likely even Google or FB. If it's for internal use, they'd just slap together whatever works and looks nice, test the crap out of it and launch (part 2 optional). Nobody would want to spend weeks minimizing the white space like this, especially over 5 weeks.
I know multiple people who have interned at Trading companies - all making more than $9k a month - working on optimizing React rendering for tables. They have solutions that are amazing and wonderful because they are superior engineers and computer scientists than mere mortals like me, but for the problem space it seems pretty ridiculous.
I know people who have done crazy stuff that has gone into production during their Google, Facebook, or even lesser companies like Amazon internships but were compensated a fraction ($6k a month at Amazon vs. $10k a month at JS). I guess this is the dollar value difference of prestige.
> I know multiple people who have interned at Trading companies
> - all making more than $9k a month - working on
> optimizing React rendering for tables. They have
> solutions that are amazing and wonderful because
> they are superior engineers and computer scientists
> than mere mortals like me, but for the problem space
> it seems pretty ridiculous.
This is interesting to me. What companies are you referring to?
I worked at one of the above and can confirm that the interns, particularly the R&D interns were producing truly excellent work at the forefront of their respective fields, particularly with the mentorship of the senior staff. I'm serving a 1 year non-compete at the moment, and the only thing I find myself actually missing is the internal colloquia for some of the in-house projects and research.
It's very, very cool of Jane Street to publish some of these details. All the firms are doing approximately all of the same things tech-wise, so I think Jane Street might get a leg up on the next batch of recruits just for being willing to give them some public credit.
Yup! One of my friends is at Jump right now, and I had to stop talking to him because he makes $10k a month while I make $8k in my full time job (never even got an interview there...)
I really wish I was born with the raw intellect to do cool stuff like this.
> But I'd rather be a well paid and connected idiot than a poorly paid smart person.
As an aside, this is always an interesting thought experiment.
I read an example in John Carreyrou's Bad Blood (Theranos expose) recently:
"Several members of the Frat Pack joined Greg and two of his colleagues from the engineering department for lunch on the big terrace overlooking the parking lot one day. A discussion about the low IQs of some of the world’s top soccer players led them to debate the question, Would you rather be smart and poor or dumb and rich? The three engineers all chose smart and poor, while the Frat Pack voted unanimously for dumb and rich. Greg was struck by how clearly the line was drawn between the two groups. They were all in their mid-to late twenties with good educations, but they valued different things."
Yup, I remember that bit too - I found myself agreeing with the Duke group as well. I grew up pretty upper middle class but I am absolutely poor compared to the circle Holmes' family was in, and I grew up pretty smart but definitely stupid compared to the circles she was in at Stanford. Its far easier to make a comfortable living off of a trust fund and family connections than actually having to move up the ladder at even Google.
Wait, are you complaining about making 8k/mo? Mate I think you need to chillax. Unless you have a big family to support, making more will not change your life to a significant degree. Money is great, but it's not sufficient for happiness.
> $2.9k
That's your choice though right? I know people in Seattle, SF, and NY who pay both less and more than that. I know many people who get tech jobs and then jump to an expensive car and apt, but there are other options--personally I choose to live more simply and save boat-loads of money because I like the idea of "FIRE". No one is forcing you to spend so much. Sure making more is fun and handy, but spending less is also an option.
I'm a journalist (although currently transitioning out of that.) Predominantly freelance right now but even as a full-time editor my salary topped out at $40k (before tax etc.)
I understand what you're saying; that's the intuitive interpretation that most people have. But the research doesn't back that up.
There are a number of studies on the matter: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=money+and+happiness+study . Money makes you happier, but only to a point and with quickly diminishing returns. Once you're basic needs are met, you need to work on other areas of your life, like social relationships, to find happiness, not just making more money.
Also look up "Hedonic Treadmill"; human psychology is such that we get used to what makes us happy faster than we expect. You think 150k will make you happy? Once you make that it does make you happy! But then a few months later, it's like "eh whatever".
> and I had to stop talking to him because he makes $10k a month while I make $8k in my full time job
I don't know what to say to get through to you, but this kind of thinking is holding you back more than intellect, connections or anything else.
It really sounds like you worship these kinds of companies and the people who work there. Hopefully it’s not too personal, but the grass might not be greener on the other side. I grew up in a relatively wealthy family, with extended family coming from poorer backgrounds - and they were just as happy as us. At the end of the day it’s up to you if course, I’d just recommend reflecting on what about those companies/people truly is aspirational besides hot “job prospects.”
I spend too much of my day looking at the LinkedIns and Instagrams of my friends and peers who are at "top companies".
1) They all have legitimate accomplishments. They have USAMO/USACO medals, chess trophies, ISEF distinctions, National Merit Scholarships, multiple research papers, etc. Because of this they are all interesting people and have significant pedigree, even if some of them went to similar schools as me.
2) Almost all of them seem to be very photogenic and have wide friend groups who do expensive activities with them (flying, skydiving, Europe trips, skiing, traveling to Thailand, flying to Colorado for the weekend to hike, etc). Even when they're not spending money they're still doing cool stuff, like going to expensive company events or traveling in business class to events.
3) Their friend groups are also accomplished, highly pedigreed individuals. Meanwhile I moved to a new city without knowing anyone now that my intern cohort moved to better and more impressive companies.
They all have the money to do anything they want without any real fear, whereas I do not. I don't have their wide friend groups at my company, and the lifestyles of the people at my company are decidedly "normal" because of my peers' advanced ages and differing priorities (many have kids and didn't go to elite schools).
This perspective is bullshit. You can do anything you want, without real fear, no matter who you are. There's a panoply of literature to help you change your mindset. Seek it out.
> They all have the money to do anything they want without any real fear, whereas I do not. I don't have their wide friend groups at my company, and the lifestyles of the people at my company are decidedly "normal" because of my peers' advanced ages and differing priorities (many have kids and didn't go to elite schools).
This is an excuse. I am not anything like the friends you described, and I have a wide circle of friends, and do exactly what I want in life. So does everyone I call a close friend. They all come from completely different backgrounds. It took years of hard work to get here. Start now.
Sorry for the off-topic post in this thread, but I think it's deeply important to refute this kind of thinking. Don't waste your life.
Well, for one thing they can do it at 22, with no constraints on the function they're optimizing. Their hard work was done in 4 years of undergrad and 4 years of high school. I thought I did OK - but apparently I didn't, and now I have another 8-12 years to even begin to be in the same position they're in right now. I'm way, way way behind.
This is the sort of race where once you get to the end, you realize you were racing against yourself. Stop comparing your blooper reel to their highlight reel. It's not healthy. I guarantee there are people envious of your life.
> This perspective is bullshit. You can do anything you want, without real fear, no matter who you are.
Well, that perspective doesn't seem any more convincing.
There are many factors to success: intelligence, character traits, hard work, money, luck. Each of them plays an important role. Each of them can, to some degree, be substituted by more of something else.
There is a huge difference whether you have or don't have a safety net. You can of course simply take a risk, but that by definition works only for a subset of people who try it.
sadamznintern, are you Asian by any chance? Because I'm Chinese, and I feel that this "comparison" sort of mindset has been ingrained into me since I was born and I've struggled to ignore it my whole life. It most likely came from hearing the sort of reverence my dad would have for people that made it (hold an Ivy League degree, become a doctor/lawyer/banker/someone of prestigious esteem, have FU money, etc.), and the sort of resentment he held for himself not having made it, and projected onto me. I flunked out of the best university in my city/province, and imagine how angry he was that I ended up in a community college (to him, lack of prestige signal = trash). Its the same mindset/attitude that holds a sort of disdain for arts majors, any occupation that doesn't spell out long-term stability and financial capability. I also found myself not really respecting someone off the bat unless I saw that they went to a proper brand-name school on LinkedIn, and while I know its irrational, the feelings are still triggered. Its pretty unhealthy black-or-white thinking, which tends to make one judge and tyrannize oneself.
Imagine the rude awakening and cognitive dissonance I've had over the years as I've met people who barely went to school but were way better programmers than I am.
I am Asian. Ironically my parents aren’t like me at all about this. They’re pretty relaxed and they would have been fine with me going anywhere as long as I was “happy”.
The opportunity to rigorously work on the best solution to a problem was probably my favourite part of Jane Street's engineering culture. They really care about taking your time to do things right rather than getting things hacked together as soon as possible. This means that all the code you touch is very well designed and the systems are all pretty great, it's quite awesome.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadWait, we're leaving the defense of our realm against mystical incursion to interns?
Albeit it is Google who start then leave to die more languages than I can count on the fingers of one hand.
OCaml is very far from dead though.
1) https://ocaml.org/meetings/ocaml/2017/slides__2017__anil-mad...
2) https://www.infoq.com/presentations/ocaml-browser-iot/
It seems that there is constant work on the tooling part of the language, and that multicore would be (on the far) horizon.
Also (perhaps this is encompassed by your statement already) there is ReasonML[0]. Switching over from the JS Quickstart to the OCaml Quickstart, one finds the very first line:
> Since Reason is just another syntax for OCaml, [...]
Side note: just finished a small project in ReasonML and it was a lovely experience. As someone who has been using Flow for gradually typed JS for a while now, I would totally recommend at least playing with it.
[0]: https://reasonml.github.io/docs/en/convert-from-ocaml
[citation needed]
PHP suffers from a contempt of the familiar. Lots of programmers of a certain age started off writing PHP poorly before they knew how to properly do their craft (in PHP or otherwise). When you mention PHP, the immediate association for some people is invariably going to be "that really bad PHP 3.5 site I made that one time." Leaving aside any positive or negative points to be made about the language itself, you're dealing with that.
On the other hand, if you work in a generally well regarded but less used language like OCaml IMO you're much more likely to trigger a "huh, I've been meaning to play around with that," or maybe a "gee, if you could pick up an ML while interning you must be pretty adaptable." The relative obscurity might even work in your favor if the person interviewing you is familiar with The Blub Paradox[0] and suspects OCaml might be higher up the language power continuum than the languages they know and you get cred for being a language wonk.
[0]: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
Except in the many thousands of companies that are looking for PHP programmers, where not having it on a resume is damaging.
(I'm in a "microservices architecture" (their word, not mine; I find it cringey, but eh) org where we're expected to deliver features as REST APIs, programming language be damned.)
But I wouldn't call it "dead" per se. At worst, the knowledge easily transfers over to Haskell, Scala or F#. (Sadly these languages all abstract-away most of the knowledge needed to write good, fast Rust code.)
But more importantly ... to business's eyes, Rust is too immature, Scala and F# inherit all the billion-dollar mistakes from their parent VMs, Julia is a data-scientist's tinker-tool and Haskell is too great a paradigm-shift for most programmers. So OCaml is far from being "dead", let alone meriting death.
Want to elaborate that? Afaik, neither of them tries to imitate mathematics.
> namely a good combination of footgun protection and expressiveness
None of those languages have parameterised modules, Ocaml is far more expressive in some fronts.
Some of what functors do can be done with typeclasses/traits. Eg a functor might take a module with a type and compare function and produce a type of maps fron that type. Meanwhile in Haskell/Rust you get the compare function from a typeclass/trait.
On the other hand you can only have one trait/typeclass implementation per type which requires newtype wrapper awkwardness if you want an alternative. Another problem is that traits tend to be basically small but functors can be big. Eg let’s say you want to write an application for transferring files over various protocols. You might implement a module per protocol which would include things like the type for the configuration, how to read the config, how to make a connection, how to pool connections, how to request a file, how to get chunks of it and so on. These things may not fit so well into a nice typeclass and some Haskell people certainly don’t like typeclasses that don’t correspond to mathematical things. In ocaml the file transferring program might be based on a fuynctor applied to each protocol.
A second thing rust/Haskell don’t have is a way to make a typeclass at runtime whereas one can do that in ocaml, e.g. it’s basically impossible to make a safe type for arithmetic mod n in Haskell/rust if n must be known at runtime. It is actually possible with Reflect in Haskell but that is horrific. It would be nice if one could do something like:
But you can’t. On the other hand not having any way to implicitly know how to serialise or compare things in ocaml is sad.You inspired me to learn OCaml because I've never thought of it as a language that's capable of expressing things that Haskell just can't.
Generally speaking, "f x" instead of "f(x)" meaning function application, types not being able to serve as namespaces for functions, arguments' types in signatures being specified separately from their names, and most importantly the preference of first-class operator symbols over function- or method-calls.
* * * * *
For example, I find this much more difficult to read (from Hakyll):
... than if it looked like this: (Insert grating reminder here that Rust still doesn't have monads. Haskell's notation may be poor, but its semantics are anything but.)Using lots of operators is certainly something that could be seen as more mathematical but then I guess that makes APL much more mathematical than Haskell and ocaml and c++ and perl combined. I don’t think that counts as mathematical but it is a difference of style.
For specifying signatures this is surely a style thing. In type theory, types are normally put right next to the values and so in this respect Haskell and ocaml are not mathematical. I say this is a style thing as one can write types separately from variables, next to them, or not at all.
For “types not being a namespace” I’ll give you that criticism for Haskell (but also for C) and maybe for ocaml but recall the common idiom of calling all types “t” and putting them in their own modules with relevant functions. I don’t see how this is more mathematical.
My general complaint is that these aren’t differences on a more/less “mathematical” spectrum. The only mathematical things are that ocaml/Haskell are closer to lots of the fashionable PLT research than C and that research is certainly mathematical. Also Haskell people tend to fetishise category theory and abstract algebra so lots of the code that’s written is sort-of mathematical. Haskell also suffers from readability problems mainly due to the people who write Haskell and what they like rather than the language itself.
> But more importantly ... to business's eyes, Rust is too immature, Scala and F# inherit all the billion-dollar mistakes from their parent VMs, Julia is a data-scientist's tinker-tool and Haskell is too great a paradigm-shift for most programmers. So OCaml is far from being "dead", let alone meriting death.
In my previous business, we used Perl, C/C++, Julia, a little Python, and others. We aimed specifically for the best tool for the job. Rarely, if ever, did one language fit the bill, covering everything we need.
I've not used Ocaml, so I can't talk to this. I can state, emphatically, that julia is far more than you indicate. I am rust-curious, though haven't found a good reason to spend time with it at $dayjob. Similar for Perl6, and other more modern languages.
If you advocate a language for the sake of the language, rather than the set of problems you can efficiently express solutions to in that language, I'd argue you might be missing the point of the language. Paraphrasing Iverson on this, language and notation are tools for expressing thoughts. No single notation/language is perfect for all thoughts.
Brutal reductionism is a beautiful tool for cutting away all the fluff; seeing where different things are really multiple sides of the same die; and asking the young excited pimply-faced advocate of the newest fad, a rhetorical "so what?".
People that work at JS (and 5R and 2S and to a lesser extent FB and Google) have their pick of jobs because they are a hot commodity. The rest of us aren’t so lucky because we have no signal to suggest we are brilliant and likely don’t have the intellectual ability to pass similar coding interviews. It’s tough.
I've completely plateaued on the happiness vs money graph and you couldn't pay me enough at this point to take a job in the finance or defense industry.
money is only a part of that validation.
1) Are there really that many things you can't do in the world with that salary?
2) Are you choosing a fair group of people to compare yourself with? Yes, you may be at the ABSOLUTE BOTTOM of the top 5%, if you only look at the top 5%. Do you have any non software engineer peers?
I can't save $1.5 million as fast as I want to with this salary (I know people who can live it up and still save $100k a year at Google and trading companies - I'll be lucky to hit $25k max).
>Do you have any non software engineer peers?
Yes. They're all in medical school. The rest I don't really have contact with anymore.
I on the other hand, grew up in a tiny rural town, went to the cheapest state school possible, and now make a healthy 6 figure salary at a no-name company. I don't feel the need to compare myself to anyone; but if I do it's with gratitude. I grew up with people who are now farmers and bakers and baristas and minor fiction authors.
You can choose to compare yourself with people above you, or see how far and healthy you are in the grand scheme of things. Of course that's up to you. If you want to dream big, go for it! Just don't come off as whiny, it's annoying to the rest of the 90% that is be low you on the totem pole.
To be honest, I don't think I did. I just want to be a part of the other bubble really, really, really bad.
The bubble is about to burst and I don't have enough to weather it.
What matters is consistency and time. Invest regularly and long term. Put a little away every week and don’t touch it.
I could go on and on about it, and I won't even drop numbers because you won't believe them. The author is a physics PhD and discusses topics very logically and steps back critically analyzes many common cultural behaviors and preconceived notions (what IS retirement, for example) that can help you think about what you really want and the best way to get there.
Judge for yourself but I think his life is a lot more interesting than rich tech kids buying exclusive turnkey vacation packages w/guaranteed great instagram backdrops. Example, walking the docks and joining a sailboat racing team, training for 100 mile bike races, etc.
There's really too much to write here to describe the full philosophy lifestyle, but I encourage you to at least check it out with an open mind. I guarantee you it's not "frugal living", the guy probably has nicer stuff than most people when it comes to clothes, bikes, tools, etc.
Honestly reading your posts in this thread I can tell we're so wildly different when it comes to values that I don't really know if this will resonate with you or not, but again I at least encourage you to check it out, just to see other options for whats out there.
I will go ahead and spoil the "end" of the guy's personal journey, since I think you might be especially interested: Despite having investments that generate over 100% of living expenses, and not having to do anything for anyone, getting to do whatever you want all day, the ends up taking a job as "quant trader/researcher" for the opportunity to solve challenging problems.
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/so-long-and-thanks-for-all...
It's not apparent to me if you want to be a quant, or you want a job that earns a lot of money and is considered prestigious by a certain group of people.
If you had the passion for being a quant regardless of the money, you could be learning and programming in your free time.
If you want the job title more than you enjoy the activity, then I'm sure you could keep studying and practicing and get the job, but I don't think you'll find it satisfying.
If you merely want money for quality of life, stability, security, having F-U money, or anything along those lines, then I'd really want to stress that there are two areas you can work on to achieve that goal. One is earning more money and you seem very focused on that. The other is becoming more efficient with your life. At any point you can make the realization that you've hit a point of diminishing returns in either area, and focus on something else.
I'm not in your shoes, but w/ a salary of 145k at 22 years old, I think you can make the pieces fit to retire in about ~10 years, while spending plenty of money on recreation along the way. Alternatively, I'm sure you can rent/buy/subscribe enough that you spend the next 10 years living paycheck to paycheck. Lifestyle is yours to choose.
At any software company you have to learn new things. Every company has its internal development stack and custom software, unless the company literally isn't a software company at all or is doing something so unoriginal and dull that you wouldn't want to work there.
I'm all for training and learning, but pretending that anything can be picked up quickly and easily is just wrong, especially in a trading environment.
Any typo or bug is going to cost millions of dollars, it's very hostile to newcomers. They will be struggling enough to learn about finance and the company.
Good job they're using a language and other techniques which ensure that bugs are caught early, often at compile time.
a compiler can’t catch a bug if you calculate interest rates incorrectly, for example.
Building your own frameworks usually saves some time at the beginning, but the costs usually outweigh the benefits later on.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the distinction between libraries and frameworks is important, in my opinion.
It is purely a matter of volume - are you doing enough business to make it worthwhile?
The last company I worked for had in-house database, programming language, IDE for that language, version control system, job scheduler... At the time they started doing that there was nothing available that did what they needed, and even now, their stack does things that I'm not sure I've seen outside, tho' 10 years on it's less clear that it would be worth starting a project like that from scratch now.
Remember, in business, there are no concepts of "cheap" or "expensive", there is only "worth it" or "not".
They said its socially useless and unproductive, which seems roughly true to me
Edit: It's potentially productive if they open source some of their new stuff? I'm guessing the whole point is that the firm is developing its competitive edge.
In a way, it's even productive if the workers at Jane Street just get to do something they enjoy. But it's odd to judge a company by its by-products.
There's no effort expended nor insight contributed. It always follows a simple formula: woe to the world that all these {brilliant scientists, talented engineers} decide to work in {high frequency trading, advertising, data mining} when they could be working on {curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}.
If you're not well enough acquainted with economic theory to appreciate why financial markets are at least somewhat useful then that's your problem, not anyone else's. Don't try to insinuate that society has lost something because some very capable people have decided to engage in work you won't even take the time to understand.
It's simply disrespectful. You have no idea what precise benefits their work contributes to society. You also have no idea what kind of charitable work they like to do in their free time or what kind if philanthropy their salaries allow them to contribute to the world. And this is all beside the fact that there are many secondary benefits of a company flush with money releasing excellent open source software and stewarding programming language development.
Can you inform us?
I would welcome a rule against empty arguments like this on HN.
CC: dang, is there any version of this that we can perhaps institute?
I’m not sure you understand what logical fallacies are (but I understand HN loves to trot them out, so I’m not surprised). Anyway, nobody seconded your silly motion, so it died.
It should be a formal logical fallacy to pretend there is no difference between "not saving the world in someone's favorite flavor" and "doing something useless".
> It always follows a simple formula: woe to the world that all these {brilliant scientists, talented engineers} decide to work in {high frequency trading, advertising, data mining} when they could be working on {curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}.
In order to be intellectually honest, you should replace the strawman "{curing cancer, solving climate change, helping the poor}" by "anything useful".
> If you're not well enough acquainted with economic theory to appreciate why financial markets are at least somewhat useful then that's your problem, not anyone else's. Don't try to insinuate that society has lost something because some very capable people have decided to engage in work you won't even take the time to understand.
There's no effort expended nor insight contributed here either. You not just refused to make an argument, you baselessly claimed that OP considers the work of Jane Street useless because they are stupid and not for reasons you don't even take the time to understand. That is simply disrespectful.
Also, the statements "developing software to gather more money from the financial markets is useless" and "financial markets are useless" are not equivalent. No one claimed the latter.
> It's simply disrespectful.
There is no reason to respect useless work.
> You also have no idea what kind of charitable work they like to do in their free time or what kind if philanthropy their salaries allow them to contribute to the world.
They didn't say anything about what the workers at Jane Street do with their free time.
> And this is all beside the fact that there are many secondary effects of company flush with money releasing excellent open source software and stewarding programming language development.
That is merely a by-product. Also, it may very well be compensated by the fact that if Jane Street didn't have that money, someone else would.
I'm not saying the intrinsic "worth" of an individual or a company to society is determined by how much profit they generate. That may or may not be the case, but it's a sideshow to what I'm really talking about. I'm saying that it's disrespectful and intellectually lazy to dismiss someone else's work (and implicitly, any fulfillment they may derive from it) because it's technically challenging but not saving the world. It's also implicitly narcissistic, because it makes the critic an ideological arbiter of the worth of other people's professions. The critic should spend more time focusing on being the change they want to see in the world rather than griefing the work of other people.
The examples you provided - blackhat SEO, ICO scammers, spam - are criminal behaviors that undermine society. The examples I used in my template are not. They can cause harm, like most activities, but they are not designed specifically to do so. That makes your examples incomparable as a rebuttal.
At this point it's likely that someone will be incensed by this last point and jump in with a lovely deconstruction of advertising or financial trading that asserts, "No, it actually is a net negative for society!" I'm not going to engage in debating that point because it's not going to go anywhere and it's not directly relevant to my point. Armchair economists have been reinventing "better" financial theory from first principles for years on Hacker News, and focusing on that particular example is a red herring.
I'd really enjoy diving a little deeper into this, and really hope I'm not coming across as combative.
Take the "blackhat" away from SEO, take the "scam" away from ICO, replace "spam" with "effective viral marketers". All of those are technically challenging but not necessarily changing the world. By your reply's 2nd paragraph, I'm assuming you will withhold judgement on these individuals/professions?
Otherwise, would you mind explaining the distinction? The only difference I see is Jane St et al are established with massive amounts of capital, vs being the little guy. I don't wish to offend you again but it seems by calling them criminal/detriment to society you are passing the same judgement that I am on large financial firms?
Aren't high frequency traders and big funds always toeing the line between legitimate behavior market manipulation?
Finally, call me narcissistic if you wish but I am a human not a Vulcan. I can't help pass judgement and say those who willingly pass up easy money to selflessly do poorly compensated hard work to help those less fortunate and make society a more harmonious place DO deserve my praise more than some interns on the way to potentially being the next Martin Shrekli. I think the world needs more of these people and they're certainly not being compensated with money so I want to do what I can to compensate them with social capital.
And finally, I'll repeat that I don't mean to troll or cause offense to you. I'm gracious for the opportunity to engage with you and learn different opinions rather than stay in my echo chamber/filter bubble.
Advertising and Facebook-style spyware deployment[0] are behaviors that undermine society, and are only not criminal due to blatant goverment corruption and, if you want to be overly charitable, being too novel for law to have caught up with. They may not be designed for the express purpose of causing harm, but neither are blackhat SEO, or, for example, shoplifting.
Ironically, your original point was a good one; high frequency trading is fairly clearly positive and certainly not inherently negative. (I don't think anyone believes they're making optimal use of their talents for the betterment of humanity or whatever similar goal, but that's a unreasonably high standard when we're also discussing advertisers and SEO.)
0: Which is what people I've talked to use "data mining" to refer to, although I'm not sure if that's what you meant.
You also broke the one that asks commenters not to be snarky. Even if you're 100% right, that's no reason to be a jerk; in fact it does double harm because now you've discredited the truth.
Please don't post like this to Hacker News.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nobody from Jane Street is ever going to work at Amazon, Jane Street is far, far, far, far, far more prestigious and impressive.
Also, they make $10k a month or more.
I'm pretty sure they think of Amazon the same way I think of software engineers at, say, MetLife or Allstate or even worse.
I've worked at small and larger companies and there are brilliant people on all levels (if anything I was more impressed with some of the experienced engineers at my first company that nobody has ever heard of than my last company). Nonetheless, if I were to put myself in the shoes of a brilliant USAMO medalist who goes to MIT and interned at Jane Street starting my sophomore year, I doubt I'd see the difference or be internally charitable towards those who weren't born as gifted or persistent as myself. They would be $90k a year humans, not $250k+ a year humans like myself.
If the elites are stereotyping me, I don't see anything wrong with stereotyping them.
"I stereotype. It's faster."
From what I've heard Apple starts at $38 an hour.
FB isn't hourly, it's $8k a month.
Amazon is $7.725k a month or $7.2k if you take corporate housing. It's more in California and NYC - $8.4k a month, or $7.9k if you take corporate housing.
Also, UW Dorms are only for summer interns. Off cycle interns live in 1 bedroom apartments in SLU. They're really nice with a $500 salary reduction.
Something like Tristan Hume's famous blog post [0] on Tree Diffing would be unthinkable at Amazon, or most likely even Google or FB. If it's for internal use, they'd just slap together whatever works and looks nice, test the crap out of it and launch (part 2 optional). Nobody would want to spend weeks minimizing the white space like this, especially over 5 weeks.
I know multiple people who have interned at Trading companies - all making more than $9k a month - working on optimizing React rendering for tables. They have solutions that are amazing and wonderful because they are superior engineers and computer scientists than mere mortals like me, but for the problem space it seems pretty ridiculous.
I know people who have done crazy stuff that has gone into production during their Google, Facebook, or even lesser companies like Amazon internships but were compensated a fraction ($6k a month at Amazon vs. $10k a month at JS). I guess this is the dollar value difference of prestige.
[0]: http://thume.ca/2017/06/17/tree-diffing/
It's very, very cool of Jane Street to publish some of these details. All the firms are doing approximately all of the same things tech-wise, so I think Jane Street might get a leg up on the next batch of recruits just for being willing to give them some public credit.
I really wish I was born with the raw intellect to do cool stuff like this.
As an aside, this is always an interesting thought experiment.
I read an example in John Carreyrou's Bad Blood (Theranos expose) recently:
"Several members of the Frat Pack joined Greg and two of his colleagues from the engineering department for lunch on the big terrace overlooking the parking lot one day. A discussion about the low IQs of some of the world’s top soccer players led them to debate the question, Would you rather be smart and poor or dumb and rich? The three engineers all chose smart and poor, while the Frat Pack voted unanimously for dumb and rich. Greg was struck by how clearly the line was drawn between the two groups. They were all in their mid-to late twenties with good educations, but they valued different things."
I'm pretty skeptical of this idea. Money yields freedom and experiences (that I currently don't have).
I'm also going to take a wild guess and say you're working on a graduate stipend or aren't in the US.
Anyways, good luck on your dreams :)
There are a number of studies on the matter: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=money+and+happiness+study . Money makes you happier, but only to a point and with quickly diminishing returns. Once you're basic needs are met, you need to work on other areas of your life, like social relationships, to find happiness, not just making more money.
Also look up "Hedonic Treadmill"; human psychology is such that we get used to what makes us happy faster than we expect. You think 150k will make you happy? Once you make that it does make you happy! But then a few months later, it's like "eh whatever".
1) They all have legitimate accomplishments. They have USAMO/USACO medals, chess trophies, ISEF distinctions, National Merit Scholarships, multiple research papers, etc. Because of this they are all interesting people and have significant pedigree, even if some of them went to similar schools as me.
2) Almost all of them seem to be very photogenic and have wide friend groups who do expensive activities with them (flying, skydiving, Europe trips, skiing, traveling to Thailand, flying to Colorado for the weekend to hike, etc). Even when they're not spending money they're still doing cool stuff, like going to expensive company events or traveling in business class to events.
3) Their friend groups are also accomplished, highly pedigreed individuals. Meanwhile I moved to a new city without knowing anyone now that my intern cohort moved to better and more impressive companies.
They all have the money to do anything they want without any real fear, whereas I do not. I don't have their wide friend groups at my company, and the lifestyles of the people at my company are decidedly "normal" because of my peers' advanced ages and differing priorities (many have kids and didn't go to elite schools).
> They all have the money to do anything they want without any real fear, whereas I do not. I don't have their wide friend groups at my company, and the lifestyles of the people at my company are decidedly "normal" because of my peers' advanced ages and differing priorities (many have kids and didn't go to elite schools).
This is an excuse. I am not anything like the friends you described, and I have a wide circle of friends, and do exactly what I want in life. So does everyone I call a close friend. They all come from completely different backgrounds. It took years of hard work to get here. Start now.
Sorry for the off-topic post in this thread, but I think it's deeply important to refute this kind of thinking. Don't waste your life.
Well, that perspective doesn't seem any more convincing.
There are many factors to success: intelligence, character traits, hard work, money, luck. Each of them plays an important role. Each of them can, to some degree, be substituted by more of something else.
There is a huge difference whether you have or don't have a safety net. You can of course simply take a risk, but that by definition works only for a subset of people who try it.
Imagine the rude awakening and cognitive dissonance I've had over the years as I've met people who barely went to school but were way better programmers than I am.