alt Hacker News> I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.
That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported.
(Edit: typo)
Those jobs are much more niche, and require much more specialized knowledge. Google alone probably has more software employees than all of the high paying trading firms combined. It's a possible career path, sure, but its like comparing taxi driver opportunities with stretch limo driver opportunities IMO. Totally different scales.
AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms.
(I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)