Erin Murphy is Jane Street’s first UX designer, and before that, she worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory building user interfaces for space missions. She’s also an illustrator with her own quarterly journal. In this episode, Erin and Ron discuss the challenge of doing user-centered design in an organization where experts are used to building tools for themselves. How do you bring a command-line interface to the web without making it worse for power users? They also discuss how beauty in design is more about utility than aesthetics; what Jane Street looks for in UX candidates; and how to help engineers discover what their users really want.

You can find the transcript for this episode on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• Erin’s website that shows off her work.
• Her quarterly journal of sketches and observations.
• An article about Erin’s design work with NASA JPL.
• A paper that among other things talks about the user study work that Erin did at JPL.
• Jane Street’s current UX job opening.

Andrew Hunter makes code really, really fast. Before joining Jane Street, he worked for seven years at Google on multithreaded architecture, and was a tech lead for tcmalloc, Google’s world-class scalable malloc implementation. In this episode, Andrew and Ron discuss how, paradoxically, it can be easier to optimize systems at hyperscale because of the impact that even miniscule changes can have. Finding performance wins in trading systems—which operate at a smaller scale, but which have bursty, low-latency workloads—is often trickier. Andrew explains how he approaches the problem, including his favorite profiling techniques and tools for visualizing traces; the unique challenges of optimizing OCaml versus C++; and when you should and shouldn’t care about nanoseconds. They also touch on the joys of musical theater, and how to pass an interview when you’re sleep-deprived.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• “Profiling a warehouse-scale computer”
• Magic-trace
• OODA loop

Peter Bogart-Johnson was one of Jane Street’s first program managers, and helped bring the art of PMing—where that “P” variously stands for “project,” “product,” or some blend of the two—to the company at large. He’s also a poet and the editor of a literary magazine. In this episode, Peter and Ron discuss the challenge of gaining trust as an outsider: how do you teach teams a new way of doing things while preserving what’s already working? The key, Peter says, is you listen; a good PM is an anthropologist. They also discuss how paying down technical debt isn’t something you do instead of serving customers; what Jane Street looks for in PM candidates; and how to help teams coordinate in times of great change.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• LIT Magazine (more recently here)
• How to be a PM that engineers don’t hate and How to be an engineer that PMs don’t hate