I’m not the parent, but I’d assume that this was an impressed ‘yikes.’ While Jane is not the most well known firm for ultra low latency trading, an FPGA engineer from that firm could be considered an expert practitioner in the field.
Is this really unexpected? A person who knows ultra-low-latency networking with FPGAs writes an article about making low-latency networking hardware for a company that needs high-speed, low-latency communications (high-frequency trading)