I think that has changed with the rise of algorithmic trading it's the software making the money and they advertise 150k+ salaries in job listings I've come across in that industry.

Tech companies on the other hand seem to pay an average of $125k which seems to be the bare minimum you would need to survive in the bay area. Free food is great but if you figure out the value of it it is probably worth $5k per year tops.

Algo trading is a vanishingly small segment of the finance industry & a very small part of what an ibank like GS does. I don't have references to back this up, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have single derivatives deals that are more profitable than their entire HFT operation. Like most big deals the "sales" side makes the money in those.

Well so far extracting money from dumb customers is still an excellent business to be in. eg charging $47m for a spreadsheet with a $100m error [1] or helping Libya invest its money in trades that soon became worthless[2]. It is hard to make money like that from trading alone with such low risk.

But Goldman can see the writing on the wall, and now has 25% of its staff in tech, because the markets are changing fast. Stupid people will still make up much of the revenue stream for a long time though, and large companies that like to pay large sums.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/10/16/spreadsheet-mistak...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/06/goldman-sach...