The issue I've run into with graphite, for example, is that it gets confused by things like squash merges.

I think fundamentally a merge-based workflow, which git(hub) encourages, is kind of inimical to stacked PRs compared to rebase-based workflows.

Wholeheartedly agreed.

Moreover, one thing NIH syndrome handwavers miss is that developing a custom situation-specific solution allows you to expand your knowledge in that discipline, create a more tailored solution, and avoid supply chain vulnerabilities that can come with using third-party packages. In my experience a handbuilt solution to a problem is going to be much more efficient in most cases than OSS out there, except in spot instances where the scale of the task is not able to be achieved in a small amount of code (e.g. a versatile graphing library), although these are /very/ few and far between.

NiH is expensive

> 1. You can do it better, with better taste

You can, or you can just work around the existing tooling, which is quicker and assuming you choose wisely, has a wealth of googleable documentation. Its humbling, because you need to learn through _using_ rather than creating. It feels less productive, even though you're 90% of the way there with an existing tool

> 3. Building something yourself lets you become an expert in the domain and the tool you're building,

It might do, or it also might just drown you in complexities of the domain that you're building the tool for. Plus the assumptions you make when first designing the tool tend to be disproven as you learn more. Its good to question tools, but not blindly re-write them without studying _why_ they do that thing in that weird way.

> 4. More often than people realize, building something yourself ends up simply faster than first learning

Which means you are very likely make the same elementary mistakes as the previous generation tools. Plus its _always_ slower to start. mainly because naive re-writes have naive bugs. But you just don;t know it yet.

At the legions of VFX companies I've worked at, the number of people who look at the asset management system and go "Oh thats not hard, lets just re-write that to be x" is too damn high. 6 engineers and a year later, they still have a broken system, but in new and interesting ways.

Am I saying that you _shouldn't_ make tooling/software or custom things? no. I'm saying that you should really save yourself for something that critical to the company.

All projects have a limited number of innovation tokens. The more you use the slower your project will go. You should really only look to use 2 innovation tokens max.

I'd say the key insight that I see on #4 is that people do not consider libraries code. They consider it black box. It is the same urge that causes teams to label a code base they have taken over "legacy" and "in need of rewrite."

Sometimes, the answer is to dive in an seek to understand it. Now, that may end up meaning that you fork the tool or contribute back to it. It may mean that you choose to build anyway, and it may mean that you come back understanding it. However, if a library is not working for you, the slowest answer is often the one where you fiddle with it until it's working without taking the time to dive in.

Where i work, there is a lot of NIH wheel-reinvention. People make exactly these arguments for it. I think it's mostly nonsense.

More like 180,000 full time employees, and probably at least that number again in external and temporary contractors etc.

I am a strategist at a smallish boutique quant investment firm. This is how we think about hiring a junior person. It's not all that different for a more senior person, but actual development experience would likely be more important, we would expect more contribution sooner from a more experienced person. More senior jobs also might have more specific responsibilities and therefore require more specific knowledge of technologies, etc. Many junior analyst roles support the team as a whole and there is less concern around experience with specific technologies, typically.

Doesn't matter. It's same as any tech. Need to understand mathematics and algos and have great fluency in code. Can't speak for the other guy but I suspect he's same: no amount of skill "aligning stakeholders" and "managing cross-functional teams" is of much use in the business if you're at a prop shop. Have to be able to write code. No "blocked on other team", "Kernel Timestamping API is undocumented" etc.

More generally it doesn't have to be bars. Go to where the people are that you want to meet.

My reply was somewhat facetious; though I have heard some pretty crazy personal anecdotes about what happens in the Bloomberg chat service.

But even taken at face-value, Bloomberg's annual fee is comparable to the yearly cost of an undergraduate degree - so it might very well be a fair deal.

Pareto is a power-law distribution.

It makes you wonder if there's a retirement-encouraged culture for inactive partners.

Which is probably what you'd want in a high-performance firm, less everyone look at the absent top level extractors and it turn into a law firm.

$100k buy in at the hedgefund I know. Its a big figure for most but starting salaries, friends & family, and personal loans will get you there.

>20% return is quite easy to justify. You're also looking at a 50%-200% annual bonus, mostly leaning to the higher end of the range.

Its a very different world!

For what it's worth, a friend of mine is a lawyer in a well-known hedge fund and he gets access to their funds too (funds that would not otherwise be accessible without making a substantially larger investment I believe).

If you can afford to buy in to a company that valuable then you probably aren't a regular employee, yes.

Plenty of companies are "employee owned" because the founders control the majority of shares. One person or a small group of people – whether they are employees or not – having total decision making power is the opposite of what worker collective means.

Such a company, with no long term plan, wouldn’t be able to raise capital.

I think you equating people that aren't OCaml or Jane Street caliber as "bottom of the bucket" was a touch inflammatory.

To be fair, another reason for avoiding OCaml, or other kinds of almost-esoteric tooling is a business need for longevity of support and of the ecosystem: if you choose something like Java you have a reasonable belief that, at any point in the next 20 years, if something breaks then you’ll be able to call a phone-number and pay through the nose to get it working again. Companies don’t mind paying large amounts of money for an expert, provided those experts are available. But in 2024 try finding an expert for some dBase 4GL system from 1998 that only runs on AS400.

    > Just be careful making the leap from "they prefer niche X" to "therefore they are talented".

Not my approach, to be sure :)

I think I have a pretty good heuristic for finding curious and inquisitive people that doesn't rely on esoteric tech stacks.

My sense is that a lot of engineering teams have lost their way so the only mechanism they can use now are convoluted leetcode style interviews instead to filter out Senior Java Dev Candidate 43 versus Senior Java Dev Candidate 96.

I write a little about this here: Your Interview Process is Too Damn Long (and How to Fix It) (https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2023/10/your-interview-process-is-...)

Facebook, even early on, wasn't really what I would consider very technical in both engineering and domain complexity.

When FB started to grow, it needed the HipHop VM[0] to make it scalable beyond PHP. I'd agree that PHP is a lowest common denominator and FB eventually needed to move beyond it to get to the next level.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM

Ah, right, thanks.

> CSFB was always a big MS shop

Hey, it's not massively relevant to your story, but this cracked a smile for me.

CSFB was a big Sun shop, up to and past the time they mounted a "SunSet" initiative around 1998. Scott McNealy came and gave talks to the engineers.

In CSFP, the derivatives arm, where the quants worked, there was more of a push to get onto Excel, build a relationship with Microsoft, which included getting onto the "Cool" program which turned into .NET.

Ah, sure, I wouldn't know anything about pre-release stuff, I was busy being an unruly adolescent at the time.

Im sure they use many technologies. But we only have heard about one, because they told us.

The bid/ask spread is never good, as it is a fixed transaction cost no matter what side you play. In fact, the equity under consideration has to move greater than the spread to even realize a profit -- with the spread, you are always "buying high, selling low". With very narrow spreads, the spread is only a few cents at most and this consideration evaporates.

The spread also compounds quickly. A wide spread indicates low volume and a sparse order book. This means if you need to offload even say 100 shares, you can single-handedly as a retail investor, widen the spread yourself and take an even larger loss.

Liquidity injects supply/demand and its always a good thing for retail investors. It goes past the stock market as well, spreads are why pawn shops, thrift stores, and even eBay can be profitable in certain goods and with other goods, not so much.

I agree with @cityofdelusion's comment.

You can absolutely set limit orders, but depending on the limit, other people may or may not be willing to trade with you. Your order can sit all day and never be accepted.

If I want to sell AAPL, and set the limit oder to $1/share, buyers would take that trade instantly. But if I set the limit order to $10k/share, nobody would buy from me.

The exact same thing happens with the buy side.

It's like haggling with the vendor on the street corner or negotiating with your car dealer.

Think of it like a liquidity tax. Jane Street and other market makers(Citadel, etc) compete over that liquidity tax. The more often a fund, ETF or stock is traded, the lower the liquidity tax.

If XYZ Corp is very illiquid and only trades a few shares a month, then Jane Street will charge you a lot of tax to allow you to trade it instantly, because they have a harder time knowing what they can get for it a month from now when someone actually wants the trade.

You can see the wide range of bid/ask spreads for ETF's here: https://www.etf.com/sections/news/etfs-highest-lowest-tradin...

Notice something like SPY(S&P 500 fund) is basically free to trade, but something like EEH costs you a very pretty penny to instantly trade. For EEH, you might be better off re-issuing limit orders and just hoping someone comes along that wants that fund. If you let Jane Street or other market makers handle the trade, they will charge you more than it's worth to trade.

Yes they would. It would be a significant and catastrophic mistake to restrict trading based on feelings of envy. It would be technically negative in every measurement possible.

So many poor policies originate from Envy and poor reasoning not grounded in logic and understanding of free markets and economics. This would be yet another classic example of that.

> Liquidity provides a great service, if we need long market hours.

If Jane Street is so critical to the normal functioning of markets that their significance between "exists" and "don't exist" is a major change in liqudity, then they are a systemic risk.

They probably don't want to be viewed as a systemic risk to the financial system.

But when you are siphoning this much money out of the financial systems worldwide (to the point your employee equity looks to be going almost logarithmic), how much further can this go until "providing liquidity!" isn't good enough any more?

That's been the go-to answer since forever, anytime anyone questions what value is being added to the economy.

> If we as a society want long liquid trading markets, then we need people like Jane Street to provide that liquidity. If we don't want long liquid trading markets, we can eliminate them and force buyers and sellers to meet all at a given point in time. One is not necessarily better than the other, it's a trade-off.

This is categorically false. Long electronic trading hours are simply a better solution, a more fair solution, a more competitive solution, a more efficient solution, and what the market is demanding. There is no trade off, especially as most liquidity is supplied by automated systems that can operated 24/7/365 if needed.

When you compress transactions into specific time frames it isn't about forcing buyers and sellers to meet, you actually will reduce the numbers of buyers and sellers overall, you will lower the value of the asset, because assets are given liquidity premiums. The more you restrict transactions and reduce liquidity the less utility an asset has. This is one of the often overlooked reasons Bitcoin has more intrinsic value than is assumed at first by observers.

When a primary issuer creates new securities this is very different situation and why an auction is needed, for example for new treasury bonds or any other initial offering. In that situation there is only 1 seller, the issuer, and the question is what is the starting fair price at which buyers appear.

In a secondary market there are many current owners of the asset and many potential sellers. They don't decide to sell or buy independently and then meet. That is simply not what occurs. Instead think that every current owner is a potential seller and every participant who follows that market is a potential buyer. Sellers attract buyers, buyers attract sellers, both when they push the prices around via the market makers. By extending the time period for this dynamic to occur to continuous central limit order books (CLOBs) it make the most efficient process, periodic auctions have been proven to be very poor ideas and results in choice paralysis of participants, CLOBs incentivize higher rates of decision making and healthier dynamics. All properly operated CLOBs will also have a circuit breaker to auctions should time be need to digest rapidly changing information and the continuous book can't be created within some limits.

By having extended market hours you widen the pool of buyers and sellers who can participate. You also allow markets to instantly digest new information as quickly as possible, this is most fair to all participants equally.

Extended trading hours are strictly better than restricted trading hours.

And there was a transition period where younger people need to know that the term could be ambiguous. It's not like they burned all the maths texts in 1974 and replaced them with newer literature. Older text books were probably in use into the 80s and perhaps the 90s.

From the writing of the era, it's clear this new definition for million was not popular, and many chose to continue using the "British meaning." So it was probably in colloquial use for quite a while, and the transitional term "1 thousand million" became the proper style.

Fair point.

That's a decent point, but what I don't get is, when I do a Google Translate from English to German for "billion," I get "Milliarde." Is the concern that German readers, reading the article in translation to German, will be confused? It would seem like the German readers reading the English article would understand.

Not trying to argue any point (I mean honestly...), just trying to understand the German POV here, which is interesting.

Hectolitres and hectograms are used fairly often (the latter, daily) in Italian, for example.

    Hecto = 100
    Hectoliter = 100 litres
    Hectogram = 100 grams

    Kilo = 1000
    Kiloliter = 1000 litres
    Kilogram = 1000 grams

Surely you'd use the base unit of time, the second (lightseconds)?

atto-lightyear = 1e-18 lightyear

lightyear = 3.156e+7 lightsecond

Hence, atto-lightyear = 3.156e-11 lightsecond = 31.56 pico-lightsecond

I think in terms of things commonly measured on Earth we don't benefit much from the jump to megametres. The diameter of this planet is 12,742 km. Does it help much to say 12.7 megametres? Not really. Off planet the distances between objects are far beyond megametres. AU, parsec, and lightyears make much more sense.

In Sweden, a mile is 10km, not 1.6… so there are other measures that exist, just not in all countries.

The mile is larger than a kilometer.

But it shouldn't be common.

Especially in conversation, but calculations are typically done in SI units to avoid mistakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(unit)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_(unit)

>>and strive to be racially and culturally diverse

But not socio-economically.

I kind of agree, but I do wonder if that’s largely confirmation bias though; they hire the best engineers they can find from an Ivy League, don’t bother even looking at decent state school people, then the Ivy League engineers they hire do well and they assume it must because they went to an Ivy League school.

I know that fancy colleges like to say that they strive to base admittance on performance, and I believe that’s true to an extent, but it certainly seems like they make an exception for students who come from a lot of money. I’ve mentioned this before but think about any politician that you think is un utter moron, and there’s still a reasonably good chance that they went to an Ivy League because they come from a rich family.

And it annoys me that people act like Ivy League schools are the only ones that accept based on performance. I applied to a bunch of state schools as a teenager and I got declined by a bunch of them. We can wax philosophical about why I was declined but I doubt it was personal, just that they probably didn’t think I would perform well based on some metric.

I'd say just go with GPA.

Fair enough; I wasn't applying for a quant position, just a software job. Looking back, I suspect the real reason that they were even considering me was because I had professional Haskell and Scala experience on my resume, and so I looked appealing, particularly if a dropout was learning it for fun.

What I find amusing is that I'm categorically a much better functional programmer now than I was then, with professional F# experience with a lot of Clojure to boot, but they haven't responded back to any of my applications in the last three years.

Sort of a difficult question to answer if I'm being honest, because I'm kind of a strange outlier case.

I was a dropout for almost a decade, but managed to find work at big corporations somehow [1], and the entire time I was pretty obsessed with learning CS theory; partly because I liked it and partly because it made interviews easier. By the time I had decided to finish school and enroll in WGU, I already had roughly a bachelors' degree of education in CS anyway. And that's not just a pseudo-intellectual assertion on my end, I finished all my classes in a single term, most classes were completed in a week.

I don't think it's helped my job prospects much; I had already had senior level positions at Apple and Jet.com/Walmart Labs by the time I went back to school, and I suspect that they look better on my resume than a bachelors in CS from WGU.

(If you're curious, the reason I went back at all was so I would be qualified for a PhD program, which as far as I can tell universally requires at least a bachelors, and usually a masters, so I just wanted to check off a box. I'm not 100% sure why I wanted a PhD; I think my brain had fetishized professorships and CS research)

So it's tough to answer directly. I think for someone starting out today a degree from WGU is better than no degree, and I think the education they gave was "just fine". If you're ok with not working in Wall Street, it's enough to get you to the interview phase. If your goal is to work in Wall Street or to become a lawyer, it's probably better holding off until you can get into a "brand name" school.

I'm happy enough in my current position and they don't really care where I went to school, but I do believe that they had a firm requirement for a bachelors (I don't bother checking), and I like my current gig so it's probably worth it.

[1] I dropped out in 2012, which turned out to be just about the best time to drop out. It seems like everyone on earth suddenly had a smartphone and there was a shortage of engineers as a result.

You won't enjoy my comment then :)

Yes, jobs are voluntary. The vast majority of people could choose not to have a job and not to entertain certain luxuries in life like having a roof over one's head or food on the table. Some even (voluntarily!) choose not to have a roof over their head because they don't like the idea of having a job.

You are describing an ideal, not what happens.

What really happens is that important information and resources get hoarded because that lets you control things. The only people "held responsible" are those you can convince others to punish arbitrarily. You'll create an entire shadow government the majority of the group has no knowledge of.

And showing how it worked within a group of 4 to 5 people is kind of useless. Lots of things work on small scales. The minute you scale to the point where you can't keep track of everyone, you're going to need an actual system in place to deal with everyone.

Fortunately for you money doesn't buy happiness and life has the same end point no matter how rich you are ::)

This isn't much US vs Europe, as industry sector. You can probably make comparable amounts of money in the same sectors in London, Amsterdam or Paris.

From my experience, the best way to get a pay increase is to code software for things closer to the trading system. Write code that makes a trading app faster and increases PnL, you'll make more money via bonuses. If you're writing back office code doing data loading, trade reconciliation or other "housekeeping" stuff, you'll not see the same comp.

Because of this, getting a SWE role that is assigned to a trading team is highly desired.

I'd agree for any other company or even public body, but I'd bet that JS prefer to keep it all in-house. They are extremely secretive.

Highly doubt that

> Some high level SWEs at Google are billionaires.

The entire tech industry has fewer billionaires than quant finance.

If you are ambitious, tech SWE is a bad deal.

Jane Street is one of the slower market making firms and generates a significant share of revenue from being everywhere on everything (MUCH easier said than done). You want to trade some Canadian lumber ETF? Jane Street will be there. Some bond product with constituents that trade across 3 different trading sessions? Jane Street's active in that market. None of that is to say they don't have any presence in major products or don't have real short term alphas/edges of course.

They've never been at the forefront of latency games, like Jane Street isn't the firm sweeping equity markets since they have the fastest radio network out of CME (dubious value) or getting their quotes first-in-line every time.

You don't make 10B returns on HFT alone.

The characteristics of short prediction horizon strategies like in HFT give you an amazing sharpe, but you're predicting small returns.

To scale returns you need to invest more, which means higher market impact, which means longer prediction horizon, on larger price moves.

They're not that good at arb. Real arb doesn't even really exist anymore. Even when it does, it's not JS that closes it. They market make, which is different.

well, running the financial system is overpaid work but it's the high-order bit in the current form of capitalism.

it's the operating system, some people might think it's a tax on everything, some people might think it provides the foundation to produce everything of value.

similarly, Google is the high-order-bit in the information or content economy, the creators get underpaid, the people who do ad optimization get overpaid.

no financial markets -> no IPOs -> no VC -> no Google and Silicon Valley as we know it.

the closer you are to the money and the transactions, and the high-order bit, the better the opportunities to redirect and organize to your advantage, and the more you get paid.