Interview in NYC
Thursday
My classmate and I went to NYC for our Jane Street interviews! We scheduled our interviews for Friday, March 15th because we had no Friday classes and had just finished our midterms the previous week. I had been to NYC long ago, but I hardly remember it. I decided to stay the weekend as well.
After our Thursday morning classes, we took a (reimbursed) Uber to Pearson Airport. We had a daily food stipend so we ate some expensive airport food.
A grounded Volga-Dnepr plane
Fried cauliflower that tasted like Gobi Manchurian
My friend had lived in NYC the previous term, so he was able to give me a tour of the neighbourhood. We passed the 9/11 Memorial and walked along the Hudson River. I was surprised at how peaceful it was—not what I expected of NYC. I could see myself living peacefully in Greenwich Village within the bustling city.
Something that stood out to me were the old people picking out bottles and cans from trash bins to bring to a recycling centre. I’ve never seen people do this in North America.
It’s so serene! 😌
Hotel room
Friday: Interview Day
I got a Starb🤑cks breakfast sandwich and ate it on my way to the office. Another NYC specialty is that all the pedestrians ignore traffic lights: people cross whenever there’s no oncoming traffic. I don’t believe any other Canadian or American city is like this. I had to focus all my attention on my surroundings while walking like this.
Friday’s daytime high was 20 degrees, which was a huuuuuuuge improvement over the -7 snow in Waterloo. 😎
View of the Hudson River from my interview room
I started off the day with an office tour. I was surprised at how big it was: eight floor for 1700 employees! The other trading firms I knew were small: no more than 1000 employees in total. The Jane Street New York office is currently tied with Optiver Chicago as the most beautiful office I’ve seen.
I got a meeting room on the third floor for the day. The entire floor was built exclusively for customer meetings and interviews. There was hardly anyone around—what a use of expensive Manhattan real estate.
Each interview session was given by one interviewer and one observer who took notes. I didn’t find this intimidating. In fact, it surprised me how “gentle” the whole interview process was. Later on, an intern told me that non-confrontational interaction is part of JS’ culture. He’s come across difficult people at tech companies and this is a major reason he prefers working in quant. My experiences in tech have been different: I’ve rarely run into difficult people, but I can see what he’s saying.
I brought my laptop to the interview so that I could code in my preferred environment. When trying to set up screen-mirroring onto the TV, I discovered that Wayland doesn’t natively support mirrored outputs 🤦. I set up wl-mirror which did the trick, but damn—this really hurt my confidence in Wayland. I switched from the rock-solid i3 (X11) to sway (Wayland) in November and boy have there been bugs.
One of the interviewers noticed that my laptop was a Framework! My Framework and tiling window manager impressed him. Later on, I found out that JS work laptops run Debian with i3 by default. And a few years ago, they were on XMonad?!?! I can’t believe this! It was already so rare for software companies to give out Linux work laptops, and JS went even further with a tiling window manager. And I’m pretty sure XMonad is a joke WM in that the only reason one would use it over another WM is that it’s written and configured in Haskell. Imagine the amount of time they put into IT support for people coming from Windows and MacOS.
After the two morning interviews, the recruiter took me to the cafeteria for lunch. I ran into my high school’s programming club president—three years my senior—who I hadn’t seen in years! He’s enjoying his life: chill work in the office, living in NYC, and going home to grind his personal projects. Wow does he love to code—he’s the only guy I know who still grinds side projects after getting a good job.
Lunch
I had one last interview in the afternoon. We then gathered the interviewees for a Q&A with engineers while our interviewers discussed for half an hour. Then I got an internship offer!… and was promptly kicked out of the office.
Friday Evening
It was 3:00pm and there were still 2.5 hours before my JS intern friends got off work, so I walked around downtown Manhattan.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, based in New York City
This is a mall
Wall Street
2024, Baby!
I returned to the office to meet up with my friends. We walked to Chinatown for hotpot.
While eating, someone brought up the “Perimeter Walk,” a walk around the 50k perimeter of Manhattan. With a bit of convincing and peer pressure, we (mostly I) got them to agree to walk the 25k eastern half the following day!
JS booked me a hotel for Thursday night, but I had to find a place for the weekend. It’s unfortunate that short-term rentals such as Airbnb are banned in NYC. I didn’t want to pay hundreds for a place in Manhattan, so I found a bussable place in Secaucus.
Saturday: Manhattan Perimeter Length
We met in the morning and took the subway to the upper tip of Manhattan. The path along the Hudson River was quiet for the most part.
It was a beautiful cold spring day—chilly, but much better than the snow in Waterloo.
George Washington Bridge
We found a camel! The dad who took this photo was very confused
Bruh 💀
A mom said “you will not eat yellow snow” to her child as we walked by 🤔.
😳
The JS interns had free access to the Intrepid, but we arrived past the last entrance time
Our route
We ended our walk at Battery Park. It was nearly 6:00pm and our feet were tired. We were to meet another JS intern and his friends in Chinatown for dinner at 6:30 and there was no way we were going to make it in time. I arrived at the restaurant and found that I had already met two of them at a club event in Waterloo! They were both doing their internships in NYC!
Sunday
I saw some attractions in the morning before flying back in the afternoon.
Central Park
Hudson Yards
They call this Suicide Shawarma
This trip was a fun escape from Waterloo; a well-needed break after midterm season. I finally got some sunshine and relatively warm weather. It’ll soon be warming up in Waterloo and I look forward to spending time outdoors before exam season.
What I like the most about high-frequency trading is the high concentration of passion—you just don’t get so many passionate people at tech companies. Work is so much more fulfilling when everyone around you loves what they do. The big downside to HFT is the industry’s poor work-life balance. Plenty of people burn out and leave in a few short years. Jane Street supposedly has legitimately good WLB and my high school programming club president would agree. I like to live a quiet life close to nature, but let’s give NYC and Jane Street a try 😉. And of course, the 500k TC is about as high as it gets 🤑. I’m excited for this internship.