Funnily enough I didn't really know what they did either until reading this article, shows how separate tech is from many products
If you aren't in a position to be picky about what job you take I understand, but I didn't get that sense from your comment.
To be fair, there are huge piles of money in 2/3 of these as well. There is obviously the perception that tech labor cannot bring much value to these industries. (Or there are externalities: techies will work for less money if you let them work on space travel.)
I guess the salaries are about the same in companies like SpaceX etc, but I would guess that working hours etc are not. Some engineer working for a bank will probably demand quite relaxed hours, negotiate low pressure tasks and have some holiday time with family, while with the same salary guy working for SpaceX will be busting his ass off and working weekends multiple times an year.
The problem is- let's say you're a brilliant genius who's willing to work 80 hours per week doing very difficult tasks. You can make $130-150k net working for space travel, or engineering traffic lights, or you can do similar very complex work for $200-800k in finance. They're hoovering up the smartest, most competitive people because the rewards are the most outsized.
From "Max Dama on Automated Trading" [1]:
> Quantitative trading is the job of programming computers to trade. It is the best job out of undergraduate - you commonly make $100k base salary, plus a bonus which is often larger, the hours are flexible as long as you produce, there is no dress code, the work is extremely fascinating, fast paced, and uses the most advanced technology, and your performance is evaluated objectively. Quant trading combines programming and trading. Programming is the fastest way to take an idea and turn it into reality (compare it to writing a book, publishing, etc or to architecting a building, getting zoning permits, doing construction, etc). Trading is the most direct approach to making money (compare it with starting the next facebook, programming, hiring, advertising, etc or to creating a retail chain, hiring, waiting for money to flow in to reinvest, etc. Combining programming and trading, you have the most direct path from an idea in your brain to cash.
At the last large organization I worked for, I spent two years trying to convince managers responsible for a critical-path item database to upgrade their tech stack. They had me work on tons of downstream problems, every single one of which was a direct consequence of "the data in the database is incorrect". They refused to fix their tech stack, pay more for good programmers, change their approach to DB management, etc., so I left.
Cut that crap. Most of the companies in these spaces are value-adding services and products. It is annoying that this kind of thinking is prevalent "If I don't understand how it generates value, it must be useless."
I understand how the industries produce "value". I, however, do not find the "value" they produce to be overall beneficial to humanity. Furthermore, even if I accept the utility of currency, it is impossible to deny that these industries have grown into a parasitic nightmare sucking the world dry in the pursuit of ever-higher piles of cash.
I'm personally fascinated by both financial and marketing strategy, it touches on interesting aspects of many dimensions, from mathematics to psychology and much more. And those fields do serve a purpose in an ever changing and evolving complex economy. But is that purpose really that "valuable"?
I and many others are jaded, because their incentives don't align with progress towards solving the big, important problems. They play their self-perpetuating games while putting on blinders.
All this time, energy, brainpower, centuries of stacked education and research only to manipulate people into constantly buying more stuff. Growth for the sake of growth, piles and mountains of concentrated wealth and power, while people die and suffer and are moved like pawns in a game that nobody signed up for.
Nature is furiously shaking and cooking our planet, while gigantic poisonous gas clouds are leaking from its pores. Our forests, insects, fish and fungi die in masses. Our springs dry up and our seas are covered in trash and poison.
Meanwhile our smartest and most fortunate are building gigantic machines and crunch data so they can "add value" covered by a smoke of ideology mixed with pretend skepticism to keep the gears turning.
There is no money in planting trees for the next generations and in facing the hardest challenges that our societies and nature pose, but I'd wager that this would be "value-adding".
And those are just the flashy ones- there's no money in wild birds, bugs, waterways, air quality, plants, nature.
Do people value the wild and getting through each day in a pure, healthy environment, or do they value efficiency for the sake of itself?