[mseebach]

High frequency trading is largely done in hardware these days. It's a constantly moving target, dealing in nanoseconds. It's not my area of expertise, but last I heard, ASICs directly in the switch is where it's at these days.

Compensation-wise, if you have the right skills and can find the right place, it can make software engineering look like bagging groceries. Mostly concentrated around financial centres, so more New York and London, less so CA.

[physguy1123]

FPGAs are certainly extremely useful but most hft is moving away from purely speed focused stuff. Only one place that I know of does asics like that and it was a complete boondoggle. The difficulty of changing, printing and verifying an asic just doesn't make sense especially once your latencies are a tiny fraction of exchange jitter, and the smarter player saw the trade you wanted to make way ahead of time anyways.