Maybe part of the problem is that people don't want to work on your bullshit crypto products, or just on HFT.
2x the salary but 10x the stress with type A finance bros yelling at you constantly? Fuck that.
Full disclosure: I'm a sucky C++ programmer. If if they're approaching me that means they've chewed up everyone else they can find. So, another red flag.
This reminds me of an old Woody Allen joke: I wouldn't want to join the club that would have standards low enough to accept me as a member.
I am in that industry and this hardly happens. Probably at places like Citadel, not otherwise. In HFT's, traders are basically quantitative traders now. They do both strategy development and trading i.e they have a strong STEM background and are much different than finance bros at most traditional hedge funds.