> My advice is be to be ludicrous.

For recruiters who contact me from companies that aren’t my usual area of career interest, I do this to see what the upper bound is. It once backfired on me. Shortly after finishing grad school, a recruiter contacted me about a quantitative finance position and asked what range I was looking for. I replied “about $350k”. He responded, “We can work with that.” I think I had to scrape my jaw off the floor. I didn’t go any further with the process because the job seemed to require extensive travel and 80+ hour work weeks (and who knows if I could have even passed their rigorous interview process), but his reply was quite the revelation for someone who had never been in the workforce.

I think quants can get 350k - 700k, extremely high compensation is the main draw of finance and what the positions seem to lead with.

From my reading, it's pretty much the only draw. I guess you could say working in an algorithm heavy environment is the other draw.

If a company has to pay you that much over typical market rate (for software devs), there's a reason.

There are thousands of engineers at Google/Facebook/etc making $350k/year or more while working 40-45 hour weeks. For a position where you're expected to dedicate your entire life to the job, nothing under a million would be "ludicrous".

Meanwhile, over here in London, last time i was looking, i asked a recruiter for 10% more than i was then getting, and they audibly paused before ending the conversation as quick as they could!

That’s most likely the recruiter bring jealous. I had the same experience when I was honest with a Dublin recruiter what it would take for me to uproot my life and move to Dublin.