I worked in HFT. (Though am now completely out of fintech and have no skin in the game). "Flash Boys" traditional HFT is dead already, the trade collapsed in 2016-2018 when both larger institutions got less dumb with order execution, and also several HFTs "switched sides" and basically offered "non-dumb order execution" as a service to any institutions who were unable to play the speed game themselves. Look at how Virtu's revenue changed from mostly trading to mostly order execution services over that time period.

Flash Boys was always poorly researched and largely ignorant of actual market microstructure and who the relevant market participants were, but it also aged quite poorly as all of their "activism" was useless because the market participants just all smartened up purely profit-driven.

If you want to be activist about something, the best bet for 2026 is probably that so much volume is moving off the lit exchanges into internal matching and it degrades the quality of price discovery happening. But honestly even that's a hard sell because much of that flow is "dumb money" just wanting to transact at the NBBO.

Actually, here's the best thing to be upset about: apps gamifying stock trading / investing into basically SEC-regulated gambling.

This is what should happen, because what the game actually being played is to profit off those who cannot react fast enough to news event, rather than profit off those who mispriced their order.

Or leave things in place, but put a 1 minute transaction freeze during binary events, and fill the order book during that time with no regard for when an order was placed, just random allocation of order fills coming out of the 1 minute pause.

These funds would lose their shit if they had to go back to knowledge being the only edge rather than speed and knowledge.

You are very welcome!

It's definitely a job that you don't hear much about but has a lot of interesting positives for people who like technology and trading. Especially if you prefer shorter term, high intensity work vs long term projects (e.g. like developers).

> Always love watching their incident responses from afar

I actually have a thread on that too: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1227335960788160513?s=20

> (I'm sure joining KCG in August of 2012 was a wild time...)

And not surprisingly, a thread on that as well: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1501174282969305093?s=20

So I wrote up how I ended there: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1663668616233885699?s=20

but that story is not the most efficient way (although I do talk about a better approach at the end).

To summarize:

A LOT of hedge funds hire non finance people for specific roles e.g. cloud, Linux tuning, networking etc

The smarter ones have realized that there are great people everywhere e.g. Gaming company SREs have a lot of relevant experience due to high traffic load, short SLAs and lots of financial risk due to outages. Applying for a role in one of those departments is a lot easier than trying to jump directly into a trading desk/operations role.

Finally, knowing someone on the inside also helps a lot which is made MUCH easier by LinkedIn, Twitter etc

You know how coders are expected to grind out leetcode interviews? For the finance fields, a common interview topic is what you read in “The Journal” (WSJ). So just stay on top of it for a few weeks, see some trends, etc.