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by DonaldPShimoda 1522 days ago
If by "here" you mean "at academic conferences", then I'd ask you why they bother to actually do primary research and publish it if they have no interest in sharing knowledge.

If all they wanted was to hire people, they... would. You don't have to sponsor a conference to attend or hire from that conference. And you especially also don't need to sponsor additional workshops, or carbon neutrality initiatives, or anything else.

It's genuinely silly to suggest that they spend all this money on things just to hire people. There are so many more effective uses of their money if that is the only goal.
1 comments
b20000 1522 days ago
because they are hoping to run into interesting people to hire. why would they share knowledge otherwise? if they are interested in doing that, why not share all the details of their tech stack and what they are doing exactly in the market? it's very hard to hire, especially with FAANGs who compete with them for talent.
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DonaldPShimoda 1522 days ago
> why would they share knowledge otherwise?

Because they believe in the value of science?

They don't need to publish to compete with top-tier public companies. I don't know of any other trading firm that contributes to open-source development, or to a language infrastructure, or to academic advancement in the way and to the extent that Jane Street do. Most companies keep everything proprietary and highly secret.

But JS chooses to publish. And it's not like that's an easy task that you can just do for fun on a whim; it takes a long time to put together a good paper. They also regularly collaborate with people in academia on long-term projects and evaluations.

I understand the perspective you're suggesting, but I genuinely believe it is wrong, and I also believe that you do not have any evidence to back it up. I think their public contributions speak for themselves, but I've also met some of their more academically inclined engineers (including their CTO), and they come from an academic background and seem to genuinely believe in academic publishing as a goal in itself. It's not totally crazy that there exists one such company out there. (There are actually a couple, but not terribly many, and the others are not relevant in the present discussion.)

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