Jane Street1h 3m
An Inside Look at Jane Street’s Tech Internship with Jeanne Van Briesen, Matt Else, and Grace Zhang
Jeanne Van Briesen, Matt Else, Grace Zhang, Ron Minsky
Interview
- Jane Street plans to maintain the week-long Insight program in January and other outreach initiatives targeting non-core schools and underrepresented minorities to foster interest in women in STEM.
- The firm anticipates a significant decline in the number of incoming interns possessing prior functional programming experience, leading to a strategy that explicitly corrects the misconception that knowledge of OCaml is a prerequisite for application or interviewing.
- Existing formal education programs initially designed for traders have been repurposed and expanded to include teaching materials for full-time starters, with plans to develop longer-term curricula to accommodate organizational growth and the increasing value of specialized knowledge.
- Interns are expected to engage in real-world projects that reach production, such as risk limit systems and automated quote tools, supported by an intense code review process where experienced staff serve as second authors.
- Technical infrastructure updates include maintaining a "speed bump" system that allows traders to bump risk limits a pre-configured number of times, and expanding the "Zero Prop" project to resolve compatibility issues across different application versions and programming languages.
- The organization aims to balance the delivery of user-requested features, the reduction of technical debt, and the implementation of large-scale architectural changes, though the latter remains challenging due to the gap between desired outcomes and capacity.
- Developer prioritization relies on direct communication with traders to understand desk-specific needs, while the firm seeks to prevent the codebase from stagnating by ensuring developers continue to write code from scratch rather than only maintaining existing files.
- Managers face the challenge of providing critical feedback within a friendly and collegial environment, requiring deliberate effort to address anxiety and growth issues amidst widespread feelings of imposter syndrome that are poorly correlated with actual performance.