This is suprising. I'm at the start of a data/ML engineering career and working at hedge funds that use technological methods seem very appealing to me. They are known for topping FAANG compensation offers and the work seems innovative and interesting tech-wise.

I don't disagree with you. I know there are elite hedge funds, as well as certain niches in finance tech that pay extremely well. It sounds like you're there.

But I'm not in one of them, and neither are most SWEs in finance. We're justing doing line-of-business .NET or Java.

Thankfully I've managed to worm my way into a niche (JavaScript/React/Python) which, while not exactly super-lucrative in the finance world, is at least much more marketable to SV tech companies than doing C# and WPF.