I stumbled into finance a few years ago and I’ve had overall the best bosses and work env ofanyone I know. I’m also doing a more audacious program of research engineering/ computer science than I could likely do anywhere else.
I like to sometimes describe my work as some combination of “making the systems that fund aerospace at least as reliable as commercial aircraft”, as transparent as intergalactic vacuum, and easy to use to boot! Or at least that’s the idea :)
On the hft front I recently started at poking at how to get accurate time on a dev computer, which gets fiddly the moment you want really interesting accuracy on commodity hardware :)