Jane Street revealed the secrets of how its high-tech trading floor works
Last year, we reported that one of the unusual quirks of Jane Street's trading floor is that it's constantly reorganizing where its traders are sat and which teams are sat together. As it turns out, traders don't just move desks, they move desks.
Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.
Jane Street recently featured its physical engineering head Daniel Pontecorvo on its Signals and Threads podcast. Pontecorvo said that, to accommodate these constant moves without having to constantly rearrange the meticulous setups of traders and engineers, Jane Street installed wheels on the desks of individual traders. These desks are arranged into multiple rows, each roughly "four feet wide." These movable desks are standard across Jane Street's global offices, which have double-height ceilings and can span "hundreds of thousands of square feet."
The moves are intended to promote collaboration between teams and change communication patterns to see what works, and what doesn't. Jane Street must really want to do them because it's not an easy process. Pontecorvo said there's a dedicated "MAC (moves, adds and changes)" team that oversees changes, which can at times encompass hundreds of desk moves in a week. Jane Street CTO Ron Minsky said there are roughly two "major moves" per year, and that the arrival of interns is sometimes a factor in these big moves due to an abundance of extra heads in the office.
Pontecorvo also said Jane Street's desks have "pretty high energy, high power PCs under[neath]", which can be difficult to cool with moving desks. To accommodate this, Pontecorvo said that Jane Street trading floors are actually on a 12-16 inch raised floor, under which there are chilled water coolers that displace the hot air blown from the computers. Traders can also adjust the temperature at their desk as they see fit.
Another unusual facet of Jane Street's trading floor is soon to be poached by JPMorgan. Pontecorvo said Jane Street has "circadian rhythm lighting, which changes color throughout the day to match your circadian rhythm" meaning lights are warmer at the start and end of the day but cool during peak hours.
Jane Street also monitors levels of carbon dioxide in its offices and removes it with CO2 scrubbers used on spacecraft, in order to limit nervousness among its staff. Oh, and there's a coffee machine.
Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: Telegram: @AlexMcMurray, Signal: @AlexMcMurrayEFC.88 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com.
Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it’s offensive or libellous (in which case it won’t.)
