@Xela But you have to understand that the majority of ET posters are Americans discussing US markets and US issues. Tuition is exorbitantly priced in the states especially for med school. According to this article med school can be 2-3x higher in the states, topping out at 250K. http://www.studentdoctor.net/2014/01/studying-medicine-in-europe/ Med students need a license to run labs in a hospital lab. We're just discussing apples and oranges here. Have a good weekend
...math isn't exactly a low paying field. I'm surviving. I'm mediocre as far as math majors at my school go and my "talents" where pretty sought after. Ostensibly the most profitable trader on this forum was a math major. Math is among the most difficult but also lucrative majors out there because the people who survive it without switching to anthropology graduate with the ability to learn abstract material.
I'll be honest with you, you may be right that some employers and certain jobs in finance value any level of programming skills, but Google, Microsoft, and every HFT company I'm aware of know that it's just not worth employing a junior software developer whose skills are not up to standard. The damage that someone who doesn't know what they're doing can do is just way too great. Imagine if you had to go back and double check everything that someone did (excepting code review, which obviously is and should be a thing), it could cost a company hundreds of man hours to fix these mistakes. The thing about nascent programmers (myself included sometimes) is that they don't know what they don't know. Software is a very malleable medium, there's almost always multiple ways to achieve a task. That doesn't mean that the way a task is achieved is inline with company standards, extensible, or fully tested such that it doesn't break itself or existing software. Basic skills are fine and even helpful for data analysis jobs and just maybe being "the best guy to ask" around the office, but in the trading field with money on the line, you just can't trust nascent people past data analysis because the risk is just too great.
I remember the first time I worked with a developer, we were testing an algo live. It fired off about 500 orders in a second and I remember what he said exactly: "Oops!" Luckily I'd spoken with my broker ahead of time to restrict my account to trading one contract only. Algo trading is akin to juggling knives sometimes. My limited experience with algo trading has given me a healthy respect of the risks, both known and unknown. Aberrant behavior from an algo is deadly.
Out of curiosity, how is it that you've come to learn this? This means that you not only know one that is highly profitable, but that you also know many on here who are not as profitable, but yet still profitable to be able to rank them as being below this one individual. After a few months of digging around, I find it difficult to find even more than a couple that I can say is profitable year after year since nobody shares such personal information. I can only think of a couple of threads off the top of my head where numbers are shared by members. (Neke and Lescor)