[shanwang]

Agree.

Teams like strats or any quantitive developer roles may not be good either. There may be some interesting jobs in systems require ultra low latency if you get to build them from scratch or rewrite them.

It shouldn't come as a surprise, the bank interviews are way easier than interviews with google/facebook.

The sad reality is, in London there are very few employers pay as much as the financial service sector, if you can't get into google/facebook, and don't want to migrate to another country, you either work for a financial service company, or take a massive pay cut.