if you are extremely intelligent and have specialized skills (hardware or machine learning god) you can make much more in the HFT space throughout your career (and it is more technically challenging which i find interesting). however, this comes at a cost in that the WLB is definitely worse than a Meta and substantially worse than a Microsoft/Google. HFT industry is similarly stable to tech so don’t need to worry about, but harder to get jobs since there’s a limited number of highly selective, small companies. so if you get the chance to work at one of these firms work very hard at first so you don’t get fired till you have solid experience.