[FrojoS]

>A quant colleague of mine, who has a PhD in Physics from an >Ivy League school told me that he, and many of his friends, >left academia because there were simply no positions for >them.

Then why not work in any other industry? Going from the worst paid to the best paid occupation is not really something you have to push most people to.

[dagw]

A good friend of mine became a quant simply because they where the only people remotely interested in hiring someone with an MSc in math and then letting them actually work with interesting high level math. The money or any actual desire to work in finance never really factored into it.

[Turing_Machine]

They can't do the work they love, so they at least want to be well paid for doing other work that's less interesting. It makes sense to me.

[paperwork]

btw, the work is not always less interesting. Think of it this way, this industry has ambitious people from pure science PhDs, mathematicians, statisticians, programmers, MBAs, idiot nephews of rich uncles...everyone is competing.

If you are successful, you can justify building a huge Hadoop cluster, experimenting with hardware TCP/IP processing, buying (or storing) petabytes of data for statistical analysis. Pretty interesting stuff for a geek.

Obviously, not every one in the industry gets these chances and all this not necessary. I know of people who earn their living doing automated trading in ... visual basic (not VB .NET) :)