Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think so. Yes, you do get paid more, but you're expected to put in more hours and forced to work within a much more rigid environment with less transparency. Also, throughout finance firms (even among the more tech-saavy ones), the programmers are ostensibly considered second-class to the portfolio managers, and this is reflected in the pay. So yes, they get paid more, and as a result they may be more a bit m…
I'm much more quant than programmer, but even programmers at trading companies get paid at least as well as they do at Google/Facebook (and obviously much better than they'd be paid at a startup) to start with. Not to mention that programmers at SV companies are second class to product managers, so the relative status situation isn't that different. I don't know where you get the more hours/more rigid attitude from.…
And if you're a quant, then it's totally not fair to compare yourself against a programmer, because even if you're doing programming, it's a completely different job altogether. Quant jobs (the ones immediately touching the models) are much more statistics focused, and the coding is more a means more than an end.