Wall street is indeed a very broad term and the biggest distinction is between banks and hedge funds. Below is a very rough outline and no doubt some people wil

Wall street is indeed a very broad term and the biggest distinction is between banks and hedge funds. Below is a very rough outline and no doubt some people will debate it. Banks are more standard jobs, where devs are usually siloed into doing very specific assignments in a pre-determined part of the business. If you want to build a long-term career in finance through banking, you should get in, climb the corporate ladder by doing your particular job well and hope your department’s business will be popular and sexy in 5 years. In 2003-2008 CDO and derivatives were the sexiest thing alive, after which it became less interesting. In terms of pay, you would get a higher base salary guaranteed, but any extra profit the bank makes will have to be split across all departments (sales, client, compliance …), so bonuses tend to be limited. Hedge funds and prop trading are smaller institutions than banks, as such they are more tech-oriented (especially systematic trading places, where algorithmic platforms are built to place and execute trades). Hedge funds client their clients’ money and charge a commission on profits, while prop traders trade their own money and could potentially go down in one day. All this presents challenging problems to solve. Therefore, HFs and prop trading value good developers and they work closely with quant analysts and traders. While they usually look for strong backend developers, there is demand for good front-end engineers to refine the client facing applications too. Due to the nature of the job you would be working with traders and analysts, which is a good way to learn about finance proper. Smaller headcount in hedge funds generally encourages more collaboration and working in tighter teams, as it’s inefficient for the business to silo people away from each other as much. Another advantage is splitting the bonus across fewer people, leaves more money per person, which is where a dev with a lower base will beat your banker dev and can (not always) get > 250k.