by markasoftware
3 subcomments
- Having worked in the quant industry outside of JS, and being good friends with a couple JS employees, I'm of the opinion that in 2025 ocaml is hurting JS more than it helps them. Using an obscure programming language absolutely can help out your hiring effort at a small company; for example, I did an internship at quite possibly the only US-based company doing Common Lisp that hired undergrad interns. All my coworkers were extremely talented because (a) people who use Common Lisp are definitely PL enthusiasts rather than your typical FAANG-oriented CS college student and (b) without anywhere else to really go for an internship, they all ended up at this company and (c) they only needed a few interns so could afford to select only those who had prior common lisp experience.
But Jane Street is big enough now that 90%+ of their software hires aren't joining /because/ of ocaml, but in spite of it. The well of existing ocaml (or more generally, functional programming) enthusiasts who are qualified and willing to work for JS has been depleted for some time now. Rather than ocaml being a sort of shibboleth to hire only engineers who are passionate about programming languages, JS now hires the same sorts of engineers who would work at any other quant fund (ie, generally smart CS students who grinded C++, python, and leetcode questions in college), offers them slightly more money and a slightly nicer office than their competitors, and sends them all through a 2-week ocaml bootcamp.
but oh well, maybe ocaml is still worth it for the 10% of hires who actually are FP enthusiasts and would have otherwise gone into academia.
- "Hedge funds will go to great lengths in pursuit of profits, whether it is by counting cars in satellite photos of parking lots or shipping gold across the Atlantic. Building a compiler—a piece of software that turns human-written code into programs a computer can execute—for your homegrown language? That still raises eyebrows."
Cringeworthy. Quant funds do in fact work on things like this. It's not that crazy.
- Author doesn't seem to understand that skilled programmers can be productive in almost any language. Experience in the domain is more important.
- The article doesn't understand programmers. People will stay because they are passionate about OCaml and there are not a lot of OCaml jobs.
When hiring for a permanent position, I have the expectation that a programmer can learn a new language and environment. An OCaml programmer for a position that is python or C would be looked on very favorably. Far more attention-getting than “full-stack programmer”.
- Goldman has done this for decades, pushing it even further by having developed their own language (Slang), graph db (SecDB), and IDE (SecView). Many engineers resist working it in, but for any strat it's mandatory.
- We learn OCaml in CS classes at écoles préparatoires (CPGE MP) in france. It’s an amazing language, practical to implement the CS math oriented theory we just studied. Doesn’t work that great as a retention tactic to stay forever at university though
- https://archive.ph/u10ol
by jxjnskkzxxhx
2 subcomments
- It's not a tactic. The story was that at one point the tech person in charge wanted to use ocaml because he liked it. The project was a success and there was never any reason to change it.
I'm sure everyone here is familiar with these two phenomena of the corporate world:
A) techie pushes tool not because it's useful or necessary but because he wants to learn the tool
B) something that started as happenstance ends up as a defining property of critical infrastructure.
by nesarkvechnep
0 subcomment
- The people who work at Jane Street are not OCaml developers, even though some of them work on the language. They’re software engineers which are most probably smarter than your average $LANG developer.
- My sneaky retention tactic is Elm... I'm only retaining myself though :)
- Jane Street's reported use of LLMs + OCaml, https://archive.is/HSVJN
> Using Vcaml and Ecaml, they wired AI tools straight into Neovim, Emacs, and VS Code.. RL Feedback: The system learns from what works, tweaking itself based on real outcomes.. Jane Street records the [developer] journey — every tweak, every build, every “aha!” moment. Every few seconds, a snapshot locks in the state of play. If a build fails, they know where it went south; if it succeeds, they see what clicked. Then, LLMs step in, auto-generating detailed notes on what changed and why. It’s like having a scribe for every coder, building a dataset that’s not just big — it’s relevant. For niche languages or closed-off systems, this could be the future.
- this let's them freeze architecture into language constraints. they’re writing rules of the system into the type system itself. you dont need to document invariants, cuz already you have encoded them. what that does long-term is kill tribal knowledge. new hires dont need to ask what does this function assume , they cant even write it wrong if the types dont let them
- If they've managed to escape Python for machine learning tasks then it's worth it imo.
by joshmarinacci
1 subcomments
- This is kind of a weak and fluffy article coming from the Economist. As a long term subscriber I’m disappointed.
by scarface_74
0 subcomment
- This is similar to Epic Systems (the healthcare SaaS company) and Mumps.
by brcmthrowaway
2 subcomments
- Whats the WLB balance like at JS? I would have loved to be making $1mn straight out of college!
by adamnemecek
1 subcomments
- It’s not obscure.
- tldr: OCaml
- tldr: OCaml and no non-competes
- [flagged]
by OutOfHere
4 subcomments
- This tactic won't work so well anymore in the age of LLMs. With the exception of horror movies like C and C++, is now very easy to learn and work with a new language by learning it on the go while working with it using an LLM. One can and should ask an LLM a dozen questions to explain what is happening. Expertise absolutely still matters, but less than it did before.
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