[dan-robertson]

I encourage you to reconsider the things you ruled out. I had some pretty odd views about companies before I started work and I don’t think they’re so correct now.

In particular, you’ll probably find parts of finance most culturally familiar to you (eg this link posted today https://puzzles.nigelcoldwell.co.uk/ which doesn’t really capture that much about interviews but does give some indication of some interests of some of the people who work there). Obviously there is also lots of low-level programming that matters in some parts of finance too.

I don’t think I’ll convince you of much in this comment so I will just note that (a) jobs/culture can be quite varied between different kinds of companies (investment banks v hedge funds v hft v companies that sell services instead of trading), (b) companies are quieter and less good at presenting a good brand than eg big tech so online you may get a worse impression. And I would recommend that you try to find some people you know from school who went into careers like that and ask them what they think about them.

There are other ways of thinking of it too, for example by not working in a higher paying job, you are in some sense giving the difference in income to your employer as if they were a charity (ie if you could get $x for your labour but get $y, it’s like you’re giving $(y-x) to your employer) so you may want to feel that is a deal you’re happy with. If you work for a charity then maybe that feels like a good deal to you, and that’s obviously fine too.