I work with a bunch of HFT firms and my impression is as follows:
>what are the kinds of tradeoffs involved in these jobs that pay so extraordinarily well so early in one's career?
>Is it a case of spending your 20s 8am-10pm in the office, no weekends, no vacation, etc?
You'll be in the office for the bulk of the trading day. You will need to be available/online though not necessarily "working" around open and close (possibly from home, many employers are flexible about butt-in-seat hours). Early mornings are rare. Late evenings will be commonplace if your employer does not have their end of day routine down.
If the team you work with is on their game this business is basically a money tree and predictably with that comes a very good work life balance. I have no idea how much vacation these people take but things get very, very quite around basically every holiday so I don't think they're lacking.
>Or, if not, then what's the path into a job like this? Are they simply 0.00001% level brilliant people, lucky, well connected?
Some combination of all of the above and being in the right place at the right time. These are smart people who understand finance, understand tech and understand the implementation. The algorithmic arms race isn't all that fast but the competition is stiff enough that you need to have all your T's crossed and you I's dotted to make money. Have you ever considered buying a microwave link because the fastest fiber money can buy is too slow. That's the level to which everything is built. People roll their own implementations of protocols because the off the shelf ones aren't optimized for what they want to do. Some of these firms reverse engineer the topology of the exchange's computer systems (by sending various orders and carefully analyzing the responses) in order to gain a competitive edge. This stuff can get crazy.
A lot of these firms need to stay under a specific headcount for legal/compliance reasons and when you need to cram that level of competency in all those skills into very few people they obviously wind up being exceptional (in the literal sense) people and they are compensated accordingly (because supply and demand).
It's even better than it sounds. During those two weeks, they're prohibited from conducting their job by law. They would get in trouble for responding to a normal work email. Very few highly compensated people get vacation like that.
>what are the kinds of tradeoffs involved in these jobs that pay so extraordinarily well so early in one's career?
>Is it a case of spending your 20s 8am-10pm in the office, no weekends, no vacation, etc?
You'll be in the office for the bulk of the trading day. You will need to be available/online though not necessarily "working" around open and close (possibly from home, many employers are flexible about butt-in-seat hours). Early mornings are rare. Late evenings will be commonplace if your employer does not have their end of day routine down.
If the team you work with is on their game this business is basically a money tree and predictably with that comes a very good work life balance. I have no idea how much vacation these people take but things get very, very quite around basically every holiday so I don't think they're lacking.
>Or, if not, then what's the path into a job like this? Are they simply 0.00001% level brilliant people, lucky, well connected?
Some combination of all of the above and being in the right place at the right time. These are smart people who understand finance, understand tech and understand the implementation. The algorithmic arms race isn't all that fast but the competition is stiff enough that you need to have all your T's crossed and you I's dotted to make money. Have you ever considered buying a microwave link because the fastest fiber money can buy is too slow. That's the level to which everything is built. People roll their own implementations of protocols because the off the shelf ones aren't optimized for what they want to do. Some of these firms reverse engineer the topology of the exchange's computer systems (by sending various orders and carefully analyzing the responses) in order to gain a competitive edge. This stuff can get crazy.
A lot of these firms need to stay under a specific headcount for legal/compliance reasons and when you need to cram that level of competency in all those skills into very few people they obviously wind up being exceptional (in the literal sense) people and they are compensated accordingly (because supply and demand).