Well, a programmer/statistician/scientist working for "the financial services industry" has only one purpose there: to maximize the amount of money they make, through whatever clever means possible. Who came up with CDOs, for example? High Frequency Trading and their algorithms competing against each other?

In today's world, the financial services industry makes almost all of its money through exploiting the absurdity/loose regulations of our current economic system. Gambling, pretty much. They keep whatever profits they make, and have us pay their losses (bailouts etc). They reap insane profits at the expense of the health of our economies, and they are not the ones to suffer the consequences. It's us little folk.

A "quant" working at Goldman Sachs is just a tool used by the fat cats in charge. Do you think they can work for hedge funds and the like and not have any sense of something being wrong? Going there is a conscious choice. Staying there is another. I bet the unusually big salary helps them rationalize those choices though.