you're expected to put in more hours There are some trading houses with really terrible cultures, but there are plenty where people work 9-to-5. Possibly 9-to-

you're expected to put in more hours There are some trading houses with really terrible cultures, but there are plenty where people work 9-to-5. Possibly 9-to-7, if a new strategy is being deployed that week. The 12-hour-per-day shops exist, but they're not the norm and they don't get the best people. At least, they don't get good people on the entry level. Top traders will work at them, for a price, but trading companies promote from within a lot more than tech, so that actually hurts them. within a much more rigid environment with less transparency. That's regulatory. It's true that it'd be hard for a trading firm to pull off a Valve-like structure, but most tech companies have the same barriers and permissions systems (but for arbitrary and stupid reasons). If you work for a closed-allocation tech company, there's no good reason not to trade up to a financial job with 50-100+ percent more pay and no fundamental change in work quality. Financial firms also value loyalty more and promote from within. Tech companies almost never promote from within, because they have that emasculated social-climbing mentality of always feeling the need for "better" people. Traders, culturally, have more of humility. "We're regular guys making money doing something hard." (There are some prima donna star traders who are exceptions, but they tend to fall hard and when they do, they're viciously attacked-- as they should be.) Also, throughout finance firms (even among the more tech-saavy ones), the programmers are ostensibly considered second-class to the portfolio managers, and this is reflected in the pay. If you're savvy at all, you'll establish yourself as a quant-who-codes, not a pure programmer. I don't think the Valley is different, in this regard. Non-managing programmers are, if anything, third-class citizens compared to venture capitalists, executives, and the people who are well-connected enough to be made founders. Trust me. Outside of the few open-allocation tech companies (e.g. Valve, Github) the financial world's deal is across-the-board superior. It's harder to get into, though.