[stackskipton]

Jane Street is always a bad example since they are working on niche problems that few people experience.

Sure, Tall Poppy happens because A) It's human nature and B) Companies don't want unusual poppy size, they want same size so when it's time to harvest some of them, they can just quickly cut.

[arkestra]

Feh, I think the world would be a better place if more collective endeavour was organised along Jane Street's model. It's not so much the problem domain that makes JS unusual, it's rather that they're going for being a heterarchy (or something adjacent to that) rather than a hierarchy. A lot of what people think of as the bad side-effects of "human nature" are just negative side-effects of hierarchical models of organisations.

For me, the interesting question is why more people don't try to ditch hierarchy in favour of heterarchy. Hierarchies suck! There are presumably real-world reasons why hierarchy tends to win out? But Jane Street are obviously doing well.

Perhaps being able to calibrate by how well you're doing in the markets helps stabilise the organisational approach, and it's tricky to make heterarchy stick otherwise.

Also the outside world will always have hierarchies that you need to engage with, which will create eddies of hierarchical structure. So that will tend to throw you off.

But I think it's worth asking: why aren't more companies like Jane Street?

[aleph_minus_one]

> Jane Street is always a bad example since they are working on niche problems that few people experience.

Surprisingly (?), in my experience in a lot of industries people (or more specifically: programmers who develop internal software for this industry) work on problems that are incredibly niche outside this industry, and thus incredibly few people ever experience.