Inspiration Season
Friends,
It’s graduation season.
I always share these 2 posts in May:
This year I add a third item to the commencement pack. I mentioned it on Sunday. It’s The Essential Paul Graham , a re-factored collection of excerpts organized by a few themes I find important. If you are at a crossroads or at the start of your career or even just in HS/college (especially in college actually), read it. Graham has been prolific so it’s not exhaustive but that’s also the point. It’s highly digestible in a single sitting. If you want more, the breadcrumbs are all there.
Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule (5 min read) Paul Graham
I didn’t include this PG essay in the essentials because it’s a bit narrower but it’s a quick read that will resonate.
Excerpt with my emphasis:
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they're on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
Interestingly, Graham recognizing the importance of both schedules, comes up with the same solution Cal Newport recommends : “office hours”. It’s also the same solution I basically came to — if you wanna chat, I send you a TidyCal where my time is preconfigured in an “office hours” way. I will put things in my calendar to nudge “stacking” so I can have uninterrupted half-day blocks to work.
2 final bits of inspiration for the ambitious:
Money Angle
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领英推荐
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This is a complete answer .
Money Angle For Masochists
Jane Street just released iPhone and Android apps for their training game Figgie .
Back in 2000, I joined the Assistant Trader program at SIG out of college. The deal was that you spend 6-18 months in rotation before they send you to headquarters for 10 weeks of intensive training. Competition to get accepted into the training was intense because it was only held 4x per year. You were given a raise from $37,500 to $50k when you got accepted to it and, if I remember correctly, another raise to $60k when you completed the course and got assigned your trading job.
[Acceptance to the class was conditional on signing an extremely strict 3-year non-compete. That non-compete had several provisions that went well-beyond 3 years and ended up being the reason I switched from oil options trading to nat gas when I left the firm.]
As an assistant trader, or “clerk”, you’d support one or more option or ETF traders during market hours then compete in classes and “mock” after work from about 4-6pm. (And for that first year out of college you’d spend several nights a week playing poker for another 2-5 hours. It was a good thing at the time. We were insufferable though. If you bugged the room you’d die of cringe to hear “I’m 60 delta to hang out this weekend”.)
Mock trading was usually a simulation of option market making in an open outcry setting. But sometimes we played games. Since I clerked for several people that became early partners at Jane Street I suspect this particular game was a precursor to Figgie.
Related reading:
A little post script
When I graduated from trading class in the summer of 2001, I was assigned to an option pit on the American Stock Exchange where the most active names were AIG, GLW, Q, and EK. My total coverage was about 30 names.
I was actually delayed by a month in getting my “badge” or license to trade — I was supposed to start the week after 9/11 happened.
Stay Groovy
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