A Post About Jane Street Interviews Turned Into a Big Internet Joke

The interminable Trader Joe’s line. Chess tables in Bryant Park. An Equinox StairMaster.

These are just some of the locations social media users are linking to Jane Street in an increasingly absurd string of jokes about the trading firm’s notoriously difficult interview process for quantitative researchers and traders.

It all started after Deedy Das, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, posted about Jane Street’s reported record trading haul and what he said was his own sixth-round interview in 2014.

“What is the next day after today in DD/MM/YYYY where all the digits are unique?” he recalled being asked in a post on X.

After he answered, the interviewer asked him to rate his confidence on a scale of zero to one, Das said. He said he initially answered “0.95,” but moments later realized he could flip the digits to get a closer, and ultimately correct, date. The interviewer “chuckled” about Das’ confidence rating.

“That’s when I knew I failed,” Das wrote.

His post, with more than 640 reposts as of Friday morning, spawned a pile-on, with people drafting elaborate, seemingly fictitious tales of their interviews. Jane Street is known as one of Wall Street’s most lucrative, selective trading firms. In recent years, it offered some interns a base salary equivalent to $250,000 annually; an open quantitative trader role for recent graduates with “a strong quantitative mind” who enjoy “solving interesting problems” offers a $300,000 base salary.

Jane Street’s website says the interview process begins with phone conversations and culminates in an in-person interview with a quantitative trader, which includes questions on problem-solving, probability, coding, and data analysis. A source familiar with Jane Street’s hiring process said that mental math no longer plays an important role.

Sean Sweeney, a managing director at CW Talent Solutions, a recruiting firm for hedge funds and quantitative investment firms, doesn’t work with Jane Street, but does recruit for similar firms.

“If we have a candidate that was exceptional anywhere else, they might not even make it past the first-round screening with Jane Street. The bar is just so high,” he said.

The math and trading games emphasize how someone thinks more than their final answer, he said. Some of the employees have been tracked since they were teenagers, Sweeney said, though they don’t all have strictly mathematical backgrounds.

Many of the most outlandish social media jokes take Jane Street’s penchant for quantitative expertise and creativity to the extreme.

A representative for Jane Street declined to comment for this article.

No job offers

One 384-word post talks about standing in a long, snaking line at the Trader Joe’s on 14th Street in Manhattan, orange chicken and cold brew concentrate in hand. A man in a Patagonia vest and a quarter-zip stood ahead in line, so the story goes, and held a box over his shoulder.

“Ant on a corner of this box. Walks to the opposite corner along edges. How many shortest paths,” the evidently made-up interviewer asked. The interview questions grew increasingly difficult, and, as is characteristic of the joke posts, the interviewee was asked to rate their confidence in their answer on a scale of 0 to 1.

Eventually, the post ends with the offer rescinded and the applicant banned from the 14th Street Trader Joe’s.

Another post jokes about a seventh-round interview at chess tables in Washington Square Park, where the applicant was instructed to “optimize” the game and “market make this game.” In the end, he lost $60 and didn’t get the job.

“Failed to recognize that the park itself was the market and the pigeons were the only rational actors,” the post ends.

One user came up with a story where an interviewer walked in with coffee and an Ikea tea candle, but no laptop or notebook. The fake applicant was told to “optimize” a budget that allocated $3,600 for candles and specified that their family was “dying.” After the applicant built a model and debated when to sell the candles, the family was “still dying, but now in a more capital-efficient way.”

And though Jane Street boasts its own on-site gym, one of the joke posts recalls an interview at Equinox at 6 am. The interviewer was on the StairMaster, commenting on an imagined Goldman Sachs MD who used the rowing machine every morning.

It ended with the applicant throwing away an untouched smoothie — and, of course, no job offer.