On the other hand, your HN peers won’t look down on your cereal-bowl ad-targeting (granted, fabulously compensated) gig at Google.

Banks an Insurance have just really bad marketing, but fraud-detection (aka ML.."AI"), analytics..it's all really interesting, and if you have a good manager who shields you from the internal-wannabe-politicians you can produce software that you can be really proud of (enough time to test/plan etc).

And hell, Mainframes are such a interesting field no one talks about (but one could learn some really good lessons).

Unfortunately it's hard to find out in interviews if your manager is worth their salt.

As a former bulge bracket investment bank software developer, I certainly did not make anywhere close to insane amounts of money. As a "vice president" 10+yoe senior SWE equivalent my TC was probably a tad bit higher than the higher end of a FAANG junior SWE TC. This is in NYC. Ditto for my colleagues.

The only kind of SWE I can see making great money at a bank are those working in the algo trading and maybe the quant space, but those are highly niche roles.