Which is more financially lucrative FAANG or HFT firms?

HFTs will pay far more than Big Tech, but your work-life balance will be 50% worse (like even worse than what you can achieve at FAANG which already has poor WLB): "What's the reputation of quant firms from the lens of big tech?"

If you want to become rich, I think it's way better to target a hot unicorn like Notion, Brex, and of course, OpenAI.

My brother got into pre-IPO Robinhood and has grown very well there. He's making well over $1 million per year now and works 40 hours/week.

For the best employees, high-frequency trading firms pay more than top tech firms, but there are a few important differences:

• Equity: You're much more cash-heavy in HFT since the majority of your compensation will be in a bonus. This can be quite good, but also means you don't see the magical 10x or 100x increase in wealth by holding equity in a growing startup.
• Job stability: I've had close friends get laid off in an HFT firm in a bad year. In finance, there's much less stable, recurring revenue compared to a tech company. You might even be able to assign a PnL (profit and loss) on each employee in trading, which adds to the stress. (This is means work-life balance is worse).
• Your "rank" in the company: This may not matter if you're purely optimizing for cash, but I know at some trading firms, the traders/quants are the most important employees, and SWEs are playing a support role. This is very different from Facebook/Google, where engineers are clearly the most important job function.