This gave me an interesting thought. You mention that those trading jobs are supposed to be very demanding, implicitly citing this as a reason for their higher salaries. Well, any time a subjective factor like that affects a salary, it is based purely on people's perception of the job. It seems to me that the typical perception of startup work is equally demanding. It's odd that instead of resulting in higher salaries, the benefit is diverted to the (statistically poor) hope of a big IPO or acquisition. This is ironic since the trading firms paying $250k+ to programmers are all about maximizing profits in an environment that could be even more volatile and risky than the startup world. It makes me wonder who has the smarter approach to risk...