Intellectual Humility (Jane Street Culture)

Jane Street publishes a short list of four values on its Who We Are page: Ethics and Honesty, Responsible Risk Management, Intellectual Humility, and Less hierarchy, more collaboration. It describes Intellectual Humility as staying humble enough to question your own assumptions and update your views when a new argument comes along. It says skepticism and asking "why" matter, and that people talk openly about mistakes because that is the best way to learn from them. A related idea sits under Responsible Risk Management: when systems fail, even in small ways, the firm runs postmortems and prefers improving the process to assigning blame. For an engineer this is concrete. You separate what you know from what you're guessing. You change course when the evidence or a colleague's argument is better than yours. And you write up your own mistakes plainly so others don't repeat them. The same trait is tested live, not only in a "tell me about a time" question. Jane Street's software engineering interview guidance lists "know what you don't know" as a core expectation. It asks candidates to admit when they're unsure, say "I don't know" rather than guess, and state their confidence in individual assumptions. It also notes that changing your mind while you explore a problem is fine. So the strong signal is consistent across the loop. Your stories show you updated a position, caught your own error, or put an honest confidence level on a claim when overclaiming would have been easier. In the coding rounds you do the same thing in real time. The anti-signals are the reverse: stories where you were never wrong, where a mistake got quietly buried, or where confidence stood in for evidence. So is bluffing through a gap in the interview rather than naming it.