Jane Street engineers need to be "high-fidelity" communicators
The importance of communication in financial services jobs cannot be overstated. Banks and hedge funds often wax lyrical about its importance, as do electronic trading firms. A production engineer at trading firm Jane Street has espoused the importance of "high-fidelity" communication among its tech staff.
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In a video published by Jane Street over the weekend, engineer Mark Doss said that Jane Street engineers need to be able to "speak really effectively in a high fidelity way." You need to not only understand trading terminology, but the "pretty nuanced" way in which its traders speak in order to pinpoint an issue they're complaining about.
For example, you need to have deep business context to understand terminology used by traders so as not to create any friction. If a trader says that "spoos market data looks slow", he said that you should instinctively know to check order engines in Aurora, Illinois. (Spoos refer to indexed futures of the S&P 500 which trades on CME, based in Aurora).
A benefit of Jane Street's culture is that you're given license to speak in a "sort of no-BS way." Doss said that he doesn't have to "couch his language" or worry about "reputational impact" when pointing out an error in its systems, allowing tech staff to more easily address problems.
Knowing when not to talk is just as important as communication itself. Doss said that Jane Street technologists "obsess over signal-to-noise ratio" provided to traders, who optimize their screens down to the last pixel to fit in as much relevant information as possible. "Everyone deeply understands that noisy alerts are worse than useless," Doss said.
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