At small, purely algo shops (ala Jane Street), the traders are your nerds. They're programmers, engineers, mathmeticians, physicists, but they just happen to trade.

The incredibly aggressive people that you're talking about is mostly floor traders, brokers, etc, because they need to be that way, and they're generally on their way out, as algos will be smarter and faster.

I've worked in a variety of industries (in software development), and am currently at an HFT shop, and I've found this to be the first place I feel actually values my abilities.

This is definitely true but they're not always aggressive. Generally quants are the nicest people I've had to work with in the industry. I've had a floor trader kick me hard under his desk because I wasn't replacing his Bloomberg keyboard fast enough (<2 minutes). That's said, I've have a quant or two be a passive-aggressive dickwad too...but in general, way nicer than floor traders.

An algo is basically just a trading strategy (sure, there's a basic set of these) but speed of data collection/processing and execution gives you more options. You can design an algo to hunt other HFTs or not. You can also trade against HFTs if you're not.

This is mostly a stereotype of working at a large iBank. Proprietary trading shops and hedge funds have very rarely worked that way, especially after the rise of electronic trading. In fact, most often now, if someone is coming from one of those environments with the title "trader" they were most likely a clerk that was doing a lower paying job that just wasn't worth automating.

My time in finance generally and algo trading specifically was much more "nerd amongst nerds" than any other development job I've ever had.

Good at coloring within the lines, and grabbing the brass ring, we might say. Nerds they generally are not.

That's true, but the VC-funded world is no different. There, engineers are third-class citizens, as shown in their equity slices. (Founders and executives are second-class; investors are first-class.)

If you're comparing working at a hedge fund to working in Google's R&D division, then you're right that the hedge-fund engineers are worse off in terms of status and, quite probably, job satisfaction. If you're comparing the hedge fund to 99% of software jobs, the former wins. Hedge funds are selective enough that they don't need "story points" and "backlog retrospective meetings" and all that "Agile" micromanagement that exists when you're not selective and the managers have no faith in the ability of the engineers to direct their own work.

Some traders are assholes; most are pretty nice people. It's no different from the spectrum you'd see among product managers, tech executives, or VCs. Some are dicks, some are nice, some are idiots and some are competent. It depends on which firm you pick.

Having 60% of one startup, and having to do all the work, is inferior to having 20% of ten startups, and having power but no responsibility to any single one of them. Founders have more power within their specific companies (if things are going well) but investors have the power that matters, because they're diversified and involved in a large number of things.

I do agree with you that engineers (especially the first 4 hires) generally get the worst deal of all.