How Jane Street uses video games to train engineers to handle pressure
The trading floor at Jane Street can be an intense and overstimulating environment, and different teams have a variety of ways of ensuring errors don't occur. These range from building intricate replicas of Jane Street's systems to... playing video games.
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In CTO Ron Minsky's podcast Signals and Threads, production engineer Liora Friedberg said "the question of how to train people on incidents is a really hard one." A common example she saw was people running "the incident simulation." This is a choose-your-own-adventure style simulated incident, "kind of like D&D" (Dungeons & Dragons). In this simulation, you have to describe not just how you would resolve an incident, but other facets like "what updates would you give stakeholders."
"Gamifying" the incident training process is popular, but some methods are more niche. Friedberg said "I know some other teams that actually use Nintendo Switch games," namely 'Overcooked' and 'Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes'. The latter is a game about defusing a bomb as a team, the former is about working in a restaurant kitchen during a busy shift.
Friedberg says the benefits of using these games isn't just that they're fun but that you're "communicating a fair amount under pressure." It also helps "simulate how to keep a level head and think clearly," which she says are key skills for being a production engineer at Jane Street.
Minsky is also a fan of "intentionally breaking non-production versions of a system." He says some teams build a replica version of Jane Street's systems which "looks close enough that it's meaningful to bump around in it," then find "fun and creative ways" of breaking it. This is remarkably similar to 'playtesters', who play early versions of video games with the intent of rooting out hidden bugs and issues the developers didn't find. This version isn't as popular as others due to the high opportunity cost of building the replica system in the first place, however.
The video game influence is pervasive at Jane Street. Early versions of its trading floor were described as "one big room with lots of weird sounds" from video games like Mario and Starcraft. It also took influence from gamer-focused apps like Discord to develop a low-latency audio tool for its traders during the pandemic. On top of that, the quant trading industry has a penchant for hiring engineers from the game industry too.
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