I worked in financial trading for a few years in the 1990s. It was the same deal then: pay was great, industry was a boys club run by assholes, work environment was toxic. After a few years I was very much burnt out and had to change careers from sysadmin work to software development as my internal reaction to being asked to do sysadmin had become waves of nausea and hostility. Took me years to get over it.

So if you are tempted to do financial industry work, make sure to price in the risk of lost work time, years of therapy, etc. It was a fascinating experience and I learned a ton, but financially it was not a net win for me in the long term.

indeed.

> If they don't have an FPGA engineer, or have a very small team, they are not serious about finance, or they are just dumb.

are FPGAs that core to Finance writ large?

No. A large majority of trading strategies don't require the low latency that FPGAs help provide.

There is some truth to this statement though, if such a firm is trying to pursue a certain kind of strategy - to compete on latency, some of your business must be in hardware.

Not really. There are only a few financial instruments worldwide where very low latency matters, and there you'd be competing against people who have invested millions in custom transceivers, so it's unlikely FPGA work on a readymade board is really going to make much of a difference.

But like all industries, there are many factors that contribute to success. FPGA work might help improve things a bit even if you're not the best.