| The ads for Jane Street Capital are pretty good. (They pop up in Gmail for me sometimes.) 0. They get the job title right. If you're a quant, you know it. Is a startup CTO a rockstar or a ninja? It's unclear. 1. They mention the domain knowledge applicants should have. (e.g. finance, not just the technologies used.) Electrical engineering doesn't really have anything to do with what RedWire does -- sounds more like they're in the marketing business. 2. They describe some specific tech, and explain why it's used. Ads mention Scheme and other languages, explain that functional programming and program optimization matter for the high-performance computing they do, and state that Ocaml fits their needs best. Pretty credible. 3. They give a realistic impression of the workplace culture. Clearly, JSC has a carefully culled group of intense people with heavy CS and math backgrounds, surrounded by even more intense traders. Money and prestige matter the most; candy is not mentioned. One can assume collared shirts and possibly ties are involved. So I'm not the sort of person they're looking for, and I can tell -- I'm not tempted to fudge an application and add noise to the signal. But if I had majored in financial engineering, loved money, and truly did have Free Electron-level programming ability, this would be enough to get my attention. |
However, the one bit they don't mention, but all your friends who DID take jobs on wall street will:
"jane street is known as a smart firm that pays little"