Then they're terrible at negotiating for themselves and projecting status. There are people in finance who work 13-hour days, and there are people who go home

Then they're terrible at negotiating for themselves and projecting status. There are people in finance who work 13-hour days, and there are people who go home at 5:00. There are definitely more of the former kind in finance than elsewhere, but it doesn't seem to help your career much to put in the ridiculous long hours. Sure, you won't advance if you always leave at 5:00. You have to put in the hours when it counts, but it's maybe one or two weeks per year. Quants average 9 to 7, but a third of that time is the research and exploratory work they'd do anyway. It's stuff that tech people do at home, off the clock. The job involves a lot of research-- reading papers, attending conferences, keeping up with tech-- and the savvy ones do it on the clock. Programmers work fewer hours but have a harder time getting to learn on the job. There are some nightmare hedge funds with long hours and bad cultures, but the good quants stay the fuck away from those.