Software TC has outpaced high finance for almost 15 years now, especially for the kinds of candidates who had the option between the two.
I went to one of those universities where CS grads had the option between being a Quant at Citadel, an APM at Google, or an SWE working on an ML research team. Most CS students chose 2 and 3 because the hours worked were shorter than 1 and the hourly wage and TC was largely comparable.
> may have no interest in real technical progress.
Hard to make technical progress as (eg.) a cybersecurity company when most CS programs do not teach OS development beyond a cursory introduction to systems program, and in a lot of cases don't introduce computer architecture beyond basic MIPS.
The talent pipeline for a lot of subdisciplines of CS and CE has been shot domestically for the past 10-15 years when curricula were increasingly watered down.
I have spent over a decade asking myself when the systemic cost of this would be realized. Better now than in another 10 years - all of the cohort that predates this will have aged out of the workforce by then.
I've been in this space as an IC, a Manager, and a VC and trust me when I say the education standards have been watered down in CS for 10 years now, that I no longer have a pipeline to train detection engineers, exploit developers, eBPF developers, and others out of college in the US.
Just take a look at the curriculum changes for the CSE major (course 6-3) at MIT in the 2025 [0] versus 2017-22 [1] versus pre-2017 [2] - there is a steady decrease in the amount of EE/CE content and an increased amount in math. Nothing wrong with increasing the math content, but reducing the ECE content in a CSE major is bad given how tightly coupled software is with hardware. We are now at a point where an entire generation of CSE majors in America do not know what a series or parallel circuit is.
And this trend has been happening at every program in the US over the past 10 years.
[0] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2025
[1] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2017
I find it interesting that you are trying to find fault in my position while describing the same phenomenon in even greater detail than I could have myself. All of the roles you list are broadly aligned with the finance or adtech industries, which simply do not employ people with the skills you desire in sufficient numbers. The talent you seek is following the money, just like your peers did.