[whydid]

Grass is always greener my friend.

Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for custom reporting.

[udev4096]

OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques.

I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit

[nly]

Most of them simply bypass the Linux kernel altogether

Processes reading and writing directly to FPGA/NIC ring buffers.

Shunning TCP in favour of UDP based protocols that are easy to optimize for your particular usecas in userspace.

Removing cores from the Linux scheduler entirely and pinning processes to those cores.

This stuff isn't even novel, it's been standard practice for a couple of decades.

[deivid]

Some jobs at HFT deal with a lot of this fun--I was doing Linux at one for 6 years.

A lot of jobs are extremely mundane though, compliance, regulations, legacy code bases, etc.

Yes, all mitigations get disabled

[n4r9]

Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.

[secondcoming]

Not HFT, but we disable those on our cloud VMs

[fuzztester]

some use a fork of rust with borrow checking disabled.

go fish

[ericjmorey]

Probably not the case at Jane Street