Left big tech for HF, now having second thoughts

Hi guys,

I'm not sure if this is the right forum for this but wanted to see if anyone could share some advice. I left a big software company 3 years ago to join a hedge fund. I was hired to bring my machine learning expertise and apply it to finance to build new quantitative strategies for stocks.

It took me about 6 months to build the infrastructure and then it's been lots of model training. Lately I have found the job less interesting and less meaningful than my software career. The value-add doesn't seem to be as clear, the objective is not really very quantifiable from the real modeling prospective and more and more I feel like the job is just a tool in the box to have some talking points and sound more interesting and innovative to clients or management. Contrast this with software companies where it's all very real and your impact can be huge and very meaningful.

Upon some self reflection, I realized the only thing that's keeping me in the industry has been the inertia, slightly higher pay, and the hope/prospective of doing impactful work. I had 5 years experience prior to joining the HF, and will have a good chance going back, although would probably not be great starting over. Ideally I want to stay in HF industry but actually be intellectually challenged and build meaningful products.

Has anybody been in the same situation before, or anyone has thoughts at all? Do you think it's the right decision to leave HF for tech, or makes more sense to look around in HF and hopefully find somewhere where these skills could actually be useful. I thought about the latter but worried it wouldn't be that different from my current position despite all the hype and sugar coating.

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