[throwaway283719]

You generally receive a salary (dependent on what you do, what kind of firm you work for and how experienced you are, but $60-200k probably captures 95% of people) and a performance-based bonus which could be anywhere from 0x to 10x your salary, again depending on exactly what you do, how the firm performs that year, how your team performs that years, and how "close to the money" you are.

I don't think programmers in the field have an appreciably shorter lifespan than in other industries. I don't think that working in an algo trading company is intrinsically any riskier than working in any other kind of firm.

The hours tend to be longer and the work tends to be slightly more stressful than if you are working at a generic bigco, however.