What FAANG are you at that's more stressful than being a quant?!
Two friends at Apple illustrate: one says he does basically nothing but surf the web, the other last I heard is is nearly sleeping under his desk in a crunch.
Banks are where the arbitrary high stress jobs reside, and then certain specific companies that choose to enforce stress culture, like GSAM and Citadel.
But most have normal 9-5 hours, few deadlines, autonomy, project self-selection.
Not much different than shipping something broken to millions of users and needing to triage a rollback.
Of course there are outlier firms that play fast and loose and can have risk of huge sudden losses that can’t be stemmed, but most firms do risk management as a core part of their purpose for existing, and this applies to risk of bad code / bad model just like anything else.
Again, maybe I just don't know enough about how it works, or maybe I just know enough about what I do -- but every once in a while you make some catastrophic mistake that takes done Google or Facebook for a few minutes -- the only cost you incur is opportunity. The same mistake at Knight Capital cost them like $500M in 15 minutes or something crazy.
So, taken a step further, the little bugs that regularly make it into Google that cause 1% of requests to 500 on some service is a big deal, the opportunity cost can exceed your salary for years. I imagine the same thing is true in trading, except it's not opportunity -- it's real money. That just seems way more stressful to me, but maybe it just doesn't happen very often, or the test coverage is taken much more seriously, and it's better.