AI disclosure: this story was written entirely by human hands, with AI doing proof-reading and light edits. Some tasteful imperfections kept to heighten Wabi-Sabi effect.
Everyone’s heard of how awesome Jane Street is. Fewer people have heard about the times something stupid nearly put it out of business and it was saved by grit and dumb luck. I was on the systems team for some of those. Jane Street didn’t do titles, and we on the systems team weren’t above getting our hands dirty. You could think of us as the firm’s blue-collar OCaml programmers: when something broke, we were the ones running through the corridors to fix it. Call this story a Star Trek: Lower Decks view of Jane Street.
For the longest time Jane Street insisted on having its machine room close to its trading floor. When it was 10 people it was cute. When it was 150 people it was starting to feel… odd. Part of the reason for this was intellectual property concern: they didn’t want to risk having their servers stolen by spies who would learn their precious trading strategies. Another reason was technology risk: they wanted to make sure out-of-control automated trading systems could always be shut down by running across the hall and pulling power cables.
