What does it take to thrive in one of Jane Street‘s $1.4m trading roles? Perhaps great balls of fire. In a recent podcast from the electronic trading firm, an engineer creating tools for its equities traders revealed what Jane Street traders and fighter pilots have in common.
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On the Signals and Threads podcast this week, Jane Street software engineer Ian Henry said the firm’s traders all need “fighter pilot eyes” to deal with “extremely high information density” while making trading decisions. Henry said that, when making tools for these traders, he has to fine tune their size by a matter of pixels, in order for traders to maximize what’s on the screen. Some of the smallest tools can be as tiny as six pixels tall and would be “unusable” on a commercial scale.
Henry says one of two main categories of applications built at Jane Street is focused on “managing traders’ attention,” ensuring they’re alerted to interesting things amid that sea of information. He says the challenge for engineers is around “balancing noisiness” and stopping those tools from annoying traders with unnecessary information. Much annoyance at Jane Street comes from having to use a mouse; Henry said traders prefer when “everything is accessible from the keyboard.”
The irony, then, is that Jane Street’s trading desk used to be a very noisy place. Michael Lewis wrote that, when Sam Bankman-Fried worked there, the trading floor was very loud and frequently featured soundbites like Mario’s 1-up mushroom, correlating to different issues in need of resolution. The floor is presumably a lot quieter today.
Responding to Henry, Jane Street CTO Ron Minsky said that the firm’s traders actually “undercomplain.” He said that these traders have “high pain thresholds” and likened a trading day to hitting yourself on the head with a hammer; he said making sure these tools work is important for preventing “alert fatigue” and burnout. The need for speed can be taxing.
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