Why/How Wall St. Programmers Earn Top Salaries (Follow-Up)

Quick peeve: these are not programmers. These are computer scientists and applied mathematicians in the area of high-volume finance who happen to write code. They are being paid to write cutting-edge algorithms which are optimized in the extreme because it gives people who are playing with huge sums of money an edge in their ongoing tech war with their competition.

We got so much interest in our "What do the highest-paid programmer's make?" article http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592671 ($400K for a former HFT dev) we wrote this follow-up with a deeper look inside the industry, languages and tools used, etc.