btw, the work is not always less interesting. Think of it this way, this industry has ambitious people from pure science PhDs, mathematicians, statisticians, programmers, MBAs, idiot nephews of rich uncles...everyone is competing.

If you are successful, you can justify building a huge Hadoop cluster, experimenting with hardware TCP/IP processing, buying (or storing) petabytes of data for statistical analysis. Pretty interesting stuff for a geek.

Obviously, not every one in the industry gets these chances and all this not necessary. I know of people who earn their living doing automated trading in ... visual basic (not VB .NET) :)