Readit NewsI will eternally find it sad how much talent is wasted on trading. So much money, so much intelligence, so much time and effort, all the provide almost no tangible value to society.
Tyler Cowen did an 'ask me anything' at Jane Street when I interned in 2016. One of the interns asked him exactly this: "What do you think of the fact that we all work here instead of, I don't know, curing cancer?"
He replied with, roughly, "Those of you who work here probably couldn't do anything else other than perhaps math research. Arguably, working here is the economically efficient use of your time."
I think about whenever I see a comment like this. Quant firms select for a very specific set of skills. In particular, I've found that many traders/software engineers in quant are very smart but not very self-directed. Places like Jane Street work well for people who can excel, but only when given a lot of structure and direction. I think this is not unrelated to why so many people 'accidentally' end up as traders after going to an Ivy League school!
Hi HN - I'm the founder of Stardrift, and we're looking for a founding engineer to join our team of 3-4. (Fun fact: I got my first coding job through 'Who is hiring?', almost 12 years ago!)
We are building a world-class travel search experience. In the future, you won’t book travel by opening ten tabs in Google Flights; you’ll book through a personalized AI assistant that understands everything about you and automatically arranges your trip for you.
You'll tackle everything from optimizing LLM performance and building evals to integrating APIs like Amadeus and Duffel. We care about moving fast and writing high-quality code; your job will be to take customer feedback and improve our product, working shoulder-to-shoulder with me & the rest of the founding team.
More info at https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/stardrift/jobs/nC7cjhB....
Please reach out to leila@stardrift.ai to apply.