(Full disclosure: I'm a recruiter for hedge funds -- including Renaissance):
One of the points PG makes in his essays is that it's absurdly cheap (in terms of capital required) to start a startup: if you have a computer and an Internet connection, it's not much more expensive than doing nothing at all. This changes your risk perception: startups can afford to hire unusual developers doing obscure stuff, because someone with a 10% chance of utterly destroying the business is just going to change your odds of failure from 90% to 91%.
Hedge funds and i-banks don't have that sort of equation: they're brutally competitive (you can start a new service and hope that Google doesn't know about it until you're too big not to be bought -- but if you start trading an obscure derivative, everyone is going to find out about it) and they tend to be risking millions of dollars of other peoples' money. So they're crazily cautious, which shows up in their hiring practices: one company I work with brags about rejecting all but one in five hundred candidates (yes. Their acceptance rate is less than MIT-squared), while another requires a BS/MS/PhD with a minimum GPA of 3.7 to be considered for an entry-level job. To attract people, they offer the ridiculous salaries you pointed out -- but there's an equilibrium between the absurd compensation and the absurd lengths you'd have to go to earn it.
One of the points PG makes in his essays is that it's absurdly cheap (in terms of capital required) to start a startup: if you have a computer and an Internet connection, it's not much more expensive than doing nothing at all. This changes your risk perception: startups can afford to hire unusual developers doing obscure stuff, because someone with a 10% chance of utterly destroying the business is just going to change your odds of failure from 90% to 91%.
Hedge funds and i-banks don't have that sort of equation: they're brutally competitive (you can start a new service and hope that Google doesn't know about it until you're too big not to be bought -- but if you start trading an obscure derivative, everyone is going to find out about it) and they tend to be risking millions of dollars of other peoples' money. So they're crazily cautious, which shows up in their hiring practices: one company I work with brags about rejecting all but one in five hundred candidates (yes. Their acceptance rate is less than MIT-squared), while another requires a BS/MS/PhD with a minimum GPA of 3.7 to be considered for an entry-level job. To attract people, they offer the ridiculous salaries you pointed out -- but there's an equilibrium between the absurd compensation and the absurd lengths you'd have to go to earn it.
If you want to talk to some quants, try: http://www.nuclearphynance.com/