Jane Street has 160 PhDs. Academia alone won't get you a job there.

In general the new breed of electronic trading firms focus their extensive campus recruiting efforts on undergraduates. Jane Street employees have said that PhDs are a minority there in the past; the firm's CTO (who does have a PhD) explained why relying on just your degree to get a job in the space might be misguided.

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Ron Minsky, speaking in his podcast Signals and Threads this week, said "the world is actually very bad at teaching people how to program. Universities, I feel, are especially bad at it." He said that when he first started at Jane Street he was "super incompetent... I had a PhD in Computer Science, which doesn't tell you how to be a software engineer." Indeed, PhDs we've spoken to in the past have said they struggled to get a quant job based solely on their academic record "because you don't have the experience to justify the seniority."

What is it that universities do so wrong? Minsky said programming in academia is a "weird form of performance art,"  in which assignments are given and resolved with no feedback or conversation, so that it "vanishes like a puff of smoke." Minsky said software development in the real world is "nothing like that... the permanent evolving state of the software is part of what's important about it."

For example, Minsky says academia focuses more on high-level technical concepts instead of "low status" tasks like testing your code. He said he "didn't know anything about testing" when he started at Jane Street but has "come to realizing that testing is not just important, but it's super interesting and fun." Of course, this problem isn't unique to PhDs, but those studying doctorates spend an extra four years in school that they could have otherwise spent learning on the job. Internships in the sector may offset this disparity.

There are exceptions; Jane Street currently employees hold roughly 160 PhDs globally. Citadel Securities has 260.  Highly technical or theoretical skillsets like machine learning or hardware engineering, for example benefit from the extra years of study. In Jane Street's internship listings, it says it is "more interested in how you think and learn than what you currently know."

Jane Street has also been running a graduate research fellowship for PhD students since 2023; recipients of the fellowship this year include Gefen Baranes, an MIT student working on quantum computing, and Jared Siegel, a Princeton astrophysics PhD investigating Dark Matter.

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