I agree with your points about the salary and levels of competition. One shouldn't expect any odd company to slap a >150k offer on the table and getting an offe

I agree with your points about the salary and levels of competition. One shouldn't expect any odd company to slap a >150k offer on the table and getting an offer is challenging enough. That's why both sides benefit from a recruitment layer between them to help candidates find out about the opportunity and understand the company to go to interviews prepared. However, your point about the lack of openness seems directed at prop trading shops more than banks or hedge funds. Banks are large corporations and are expectedly monolithic, but they are seeing benefits to opening up and hosting hackathons. Using/contributing to open source is difficult there because of inflated compliance departments, who need to justify their existence by banning the use of open source and signing up on enterprise solutions. Prop trading is definitely the most secretive, because the people are trading their own money and aren't huge fans of letting anyone close to the secret sauce. Because it's their bread and butter, you would probably be less keen to make your methods public if your money was on the line in a really cut-throat environment. It's comparable to google not open sourcing their ranking/search engine - we don't complain about that, do we? Hedge funds are by far the most open both internally and externally. Several of the big funds I know, sponsor academic events, research, organise hackathons internally and externally. A NY HF recently ran an internal build your air hockey AI to play against human air hockey pros. Devs were working on the software and someone connected airhockey controllers to leves and pulleys. The AI won. the business model at HFs promotes collaboration and the engineers are the most chilled out bunch you ever meet, so most people end up liking the environment.