[pdovy]

This is a great rundown. It's worth mentioning though that if you are interested in HFT in particular but not necessarily being a "quant", there are lots and lots of really interesting technical problems to be solved as a pure software developer.

The upside is not the same as being a very successful trader, but it can still be head and shoulders above working at the Amazon/Google/Microsoft's of the world. Writing high performance, high availability trading infrastructure is hard, and scaling it globally is even harder. A successful HFT firm will be iterating on it's infrastructure fast enough that there is always interesting work to do, especially if you like distributed systems.