I used to work on Wall St in technology. To make 300K or more as a developer, you need to either be in Quant Finance or probably work at a hedge fund, Prop. tra

I used to work on Wall St in technology. To make 300K or more as a developer, you need to either be in Quant Finance or probably work at a hedge fund, Prop. trading or high frequency trading firm. The other way to make big money on Wall St is to become a specialized consultant in a specific field. The reality is that majority of developer work for Wall St is to build/manage legacy systems from back in the days. Will you believe it if I said I worked with a back office system at one of my clients in 2010 which was built in IBM iSeries ? Not to scare you but you will be working with old technology a lot on Wall St and not everything will be fancy new JS framework (some are catching up with those too) Also, on an average, it will be VERY difficult to get over 160-170K as a base salary. Most people fall in the 120-150K range even after years of experience. Sure, you could get some bonus on top but consider those almost zero in today's market on wall st. Pay raises ? Forget about it. You may get 1-2% if lucky. Some years, you get 0 pay raise. So don't be illusioned about the 300K number. Those are possible but only if you fit the criteria as I explained above. You are looking at average of 120-150K base like I said. Anything over it, you need to become a Director or above and go up the food chain. The trick of working on Wall St in tech is simple. Negotiate the best pay you can BEFORE you get the job. Once you have it, forget about getting a big raise or bonus these days on wall st in technology.