Electronic trading firm Jane Street is thriving. It made $10bn in revenues in just three months in Q2 of this year, and has a reputation for paying its staff very well. Last year, it paid its employees an average of $1.4m per head in total compensation. And it seems they worked far shorter hours than many people in banks.
Writing on LinkedIn, Leila Clark, a former Jane Street software engineer of three years, said that the average employee at the firm works just nine hours per day from 9am to 6pm. Clark left Jane Street in 2021, but if she’s right and people at Jane Street still worked an average of nine hours a day in 2024, it would imply that Jane Street’s hourly pay was $598 last year.
That’s a lot of assumptions, and Jane Street didn’t respond to a request to comment on whether they’re all correct.
The implication is that Jane Street is both lucrative and good for work-life balance. $598 an hour eclipses the pay you can earn at a hedge fund. In our 2024/25 salary and bonus report, hedge fund professionals revealed they worked 51 hours per week at an average hourly pay of $237. No other sector surveyed had an hourly pay above $200.
The trade-off is that those nine hours are very intense. Clark said Jane Street staff work “nine real hours: no ping-pong breaks, no messing around on social media.” Tech staff at the firm have likened traders to fighter pilots who have “high pain thresholds,” and work with immense intensity.
Working hours at Jane Street aren’t linear, however. Clark said that, during market emergencies, traders and engineers alike worked “crazy hours” and would be coding until midnight. When markets are less volatile, people work much more “sensible hours.”
Clark left Jane Street to become a startup founder, and her current company Stardrift is backed by YCombinator. In that space, she notes that the 996 model (9am to 9pm, 6 days per week) is popular, but unsustainable for employees in the long term. In many cases, rather than actually working 72-hour weeks, staff “actually spend four hours of [each] day” on Twitter.”
For elite technical talent, Jane Street might be considered the chill option these days. AI labs like OpenAI are aggressively pursuing quant talent from similar firms, but that sector is renowned for its brutal intensity and long hours. It pays similar to Jane Street, if not better… but may not be able to match its hourly pay.
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