Jane Street's Sneaky Retention Tactic(www.economist.com)
17 pointsby actinium2267 months ago6 comments
  • yeudbfbivkfknr7 months ago
    I've worked at Jane Street (opinions my own). Ocaml is only part of the retention tactic.

    The implication that Jane Street locks engineers into only getting experience with Ocaml isn't really true: most engineers there are competent enough to keep another language up to scratch through hobby projects if they wanted to; and somewhere like the mentioned Millennium could still hire someone from Jane Street even with only modest C++ experience (for example) because of their domain understanding, low-latency experience, and general transferable programming skills.

    It's just true that a lot of the people there genuinely value getting to use a functional language. Also they pay well, the culture is pretty good, and if something goes wrong you can usually just switch teams, so there's really not a big reason to leave.

    • lylejantzi3rd7 months ago
      Do you get raises? Or is the starting salary there so good that it's not a factor?
      • sneakerblack7 months ago
        Not OP and don't work at Jane Street, but I have a friend that does and yes, they do.
  • actinium2267 months ago
    Fairly rare to see The Economist write about programming languages.
    • dcminter7 months ago
      They're good on tech of course (technology quarterly in particular) but yes, I don't off hand remember them having a programming-language specific article!
  • snovymgodym7 months ago
    At least OCaml exists outside of the company

    https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2023/04/goldman-sachs...

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