Get to Know Us
Hear from Jane Streeters who work in a variety of roles.
The people featured in these videos jumped at the chance to answer
some of the questions we would expect to be asked in person and to
tell you firsthand what makes Jane Street a rewarding place to work.
It’s hard to capture everything that we’d like to share with you in a
series of short videos but we hope these give you a sense of what it’s
like to work at Jane Street and the types of people you’d be working
alongside.
Transcript
Get to Know Us | Jane Street
Hey, I’m Val, I’m a desk dev, which means that I sit very close to
traders and the sort of code that I write helps them take better
decisions faster than if they did everything manually. So that’s my
job, it’s called the “desk dev.” I am located in London and I started
here in 2018.
Do I need experience in finance to apply?
I mean, I think most people who come in don’t have actual financial
experience, right? And, I think even for people who are even traders,
we sometimes prefer to teach them our way of thinking. I emailed my
mentor the week before coming in and I said, “Hey, I have forgotten
OCaml. Cause I know learned that, picked it up over my internship.
I’ve forgotten OCaml.” I said, “I know nothing about finance. What
should I read up?” And he said, “No, Val, don’t worry about it. We’ll
teach you everything that you want.”
Are there classes you took in school that helped you prepare for the work you do at Jane Street?
I think the classes that most prepared me or the classes that I didn’t
expect to prepare me were classes that were about literature, classes
that were about sort of speaking and, how do you write the paper, how
to express an idea that is in your head. And it’s very well there and
really well formed and juicy and ripe. And you sort of want to check,
have someone check it for you so that you can go and do it and you can
go write that code. How do you express that idea? That’s the sort of
stuff that I, again, controversial opinion, but I guess comparative
media studies classes were the ones that have helped me a lot in a
very unexpected way.
Is there really no hierarchy?
I think when people ask, is there no hierarchy, what they mean is will
I be heard on my first day of work? And I think the answer to that is,
yes. It doesn’t really matter how long you’ve been at Jane Street. If
you have a good question, if you spot a mistake somewhere, if you say,
“Hey, I think the way we think about XYZ is wrong” and you can provide
good arguments for that, it doesn’t matter whether or not you have
been in the firm for 10 days or 10 months or 10 years, people listen
to you because you’re saying, okay, this is a way that we can improve
or you’re asking a good question.
Who are your end users and where does your work go?
My end users are traders. So something that I really like in my job is
how tight the feedback loop is. The tools that I work on are mostly
infrastructure tools, as well as sort of display like monitor tools,
um, that help traders take better decisions faster.
One of the things that I really miss about being in the office is
lunch break. Lunch break is awesome. The devs go to the cafeteria and
we sit down, we have lunch with one another and we’ll talk about the
most bizarre stuff. Okay. So we talk a lot about submarines and we
talk about rockets and we talk about video games and Star Wars. I
don’t know, my colleagues are really cool and they don’t tell you when
they’re cool. That’s like the best bit…you learn from other people.
Cause people are humble. And if you want to listen, if you want to
learn it is just, yes, you just sit there and you, and you know, you
also write some code and in the meantime as well, it’s pretty fun.
Also, the food’s nice.
Yeah.