They've spoken about this before and might not have picked OCaml if they had to make the decision again today. I think at the time it made the most sense.They can also make it work in any language as they claim to only recruit the best and brightest in the world (this may be the truth). My opinion is they could have chosen many languages and had similar results while balancing different trade-offs.
Regarding attracting talent, they've said they don't care about existing knowledge of OCaml as the language part is something they train staff on anyway. Their interviews are brutal from what I recall. I could be an OCaml expert and have no chance of making it through an interview without equal talent in high performance fintech and relevant mathematics.
> I could be an OCaml expert and have no chance of making it through an interview without equal talent in high performance fintech and relevant mathematics.
Unless their hiring process has changed in the past few years, if you're a dev they're not hiring you for your financial skills, just general problem solving and software development ability. It is (was?) the usual Google-style algorithms/data structures rigamarole, but somewhat more challenging.
Do those devs actively use OCaml? I thought most of the folks writing OCaml were writing the actual trade algorithms as opposed to infrastructure folks. My post was made off what I recall their lead technologist saying.
Absolutely. Everyone uses OCaml at Jane Street; pretty much everything at Jane Street is OCaml. If an OCaml version of something doesn't exist, there's a decent enough chance that they'll write it themselves rather than resort to a non-OCaml solution.
Like I said, my information might be a hair out of date, but it's first-hand.
Gotcha. Mine is just some old blog posts and a long talk from the guy that got OCaml started. Nothing like your actual first person experience. Thanks for adding!
Regarding attracting talent, they've said they don't care about existing knowledge of OCaml as the language part is something they train staff on anyway. Their interviews are brutal from what I recall. I could be an OCaml expert and have no chance of making it through an interview without equal talent in high performance fintech and relevant mathematics.