Admittedly it's not calculated so it may be a stretch, it's based on the assumption that the vast majority of spam out there just looks for forms to submit without smarts (which is also why honeypots can be pretty effective, especially if you have a small website that nobody will take the effort to work around it.)
I've seen people report that they have reduced spam to near nothing already with just a honeypot, but of course I can't verify those claims.
Judging by the downvotes (despite answering the question truthfully), I see it's not a good way to present ourselves, and frankly we don't have to make that claim. It's hard to estimate the real percentage, our customers are happy but measuring what is no longer there is tricky in the real world.
I will change the wording on the website and remove the percentage.
> I've seen people report that they have reduced spam to near nothing already with just a honeypot, but of course I can't verify those claims.
Can verify from personal experience. I once implemented a simple honeypot approach on a small blog site. It immediately cut down automated "drive by" comment spam to almost nothing. I never tried to quantify it, but it was the difference between dozens of spam comments a day and maybe one or two a week (which I assumed were probably manual submissions).
Most spam bots are pretty unsophisticated it seems, and do not pay any attention to a honeypot field being hidden either by CSS or JS.
Interestingly enough Jane Street has a fairly negative reputation within certain engineering schools that they love to recruit from. Hard to hire talented and passionate people if the only thing you can offer is a bit more money at the expense of everything else people look for in a job.
This isn't really accurate of Jane Street. As the other commenter mentioned, it's not a hedge fund. Secondly, engineering culture at JS is typically the opposite of what you described. A lot of time is spent to make sure all code written is quality, things move slower than a company like Facebook for sure.
> Best in class engineering and internet scale problems? Nope
This is mostly true apart from a few specific teams and projects. I think most passionate engineers would find the work uninspiring.
Sorry, I should have said "trading firms", but they are pretty similar culture wise. Most hedge funds have internal funds as well and they run it similar to a prop trading firm.
I think in general though a small company (JS has 900 employees, so I'm guessing around 50-100 devs) simply can't hyper optimize their entire engineering stack to the same extent that a large FAANG can. It's far too wasteful. And I'm talking about tooling, infra, and overall process, not just the code. Code review is the minimum any competent engineering org should be doing.
There are significantly more devs than that (the total is also over 900, that's from 2018).
It depends what you mean by "optimizing their engineering stack". They certainly do put a lot of effort into tooling, by necessity since historically there hasn't been much available for OCaml. For an example of stuff going beyond the open source work to make OCaml usable for large projects, see https://blog.janestreet.com/putting-the-i-back-in-ide-toward...
Obviously there is a lot of infrastructure that you need at a FAANG and not at a company with a few hundred devs. But any trading company that doesn't want to pull a Knight Capital needs to make sure their software is correct and reliable (probably to a greater extent than most of a FAANG).
Jane Street has spent a lot of resources into making sure they're well known as one of the "top employers". Their recruiters put a lot of effort into pseudo-anonymously promoting the company on websites like reddit and blind. It's pretty forward thinking actually as younger tech savvy candidates no longer pay attention to sites like glassdoor and seek information through these discussion forums. The natural evolution of fake glassdoor reviews is astroturfing I guess.
Firm performance is excellent but IMHO the only reason to work there as an engineer is for marginally more money.
As someone who has interviewed thrice and passed once, I disagree. Jane Street is extremely good at marketing themselves; before I ever worked there I received over $500 worth of "swag" (including a free iPad) just for attending talks and hiring events. The official recruiting strategy is grassroots where recruiters have anonymous reddit/hn/blind accounts to praise the company semi-anonymously. So you have a bunch of accounts posing as real employees or students talking up the company and the prestige of working there.
They sell exclusivity and mystery, but they definitely pay top of market salaries. I don't personally believe the actual interviews are any harder than top FAANG companies but they did seem to recruit exclusively from FAANG and/or top engineering schools.
Context: I worked at amazon and my buddy is at Jane street and used to practice some interview questions on me ages back (I think he mostly wanted to calibrate the questions on someone he knew fairly well, to know what kind of stuff he could expect).
I'd say the standard is arguably a lot higher, the things being tested are fairly different, more focussed on raw reasoning rather than specific techniques.
The main thing I'd say is that in general the standard of interviewing for FAANG isn't actually as high as people think it is.
Well the interview bars among FAANG aren't consistent with each other either. I would say Jane Street interviews are on par or perhaps easier compared to Google and Facebook, but it likely depends on your personal proficiencies.
