Man ... this question hits me really hard. I was absolutely miserable by the end of my years at the bank, and the part that really fucked me up was that (at the time) I could not understand why all my colleagues weren't.

Huge generalizations incoming, there are exceptions to every rule, but in my experience there are no nerds who love tech for tech's sake in the banking world. It's entirely staffed by the "C's get degrees" crowd who just want to clock in, clock out, keep their head down, and retire with a nice pension.

I wanted to work on sexy technology, wrangle clouds, contribute to open source, and hack in modern languages.

I have many friends who are still at that bank 20 yrs later. They're all directors of this that or the other thing, still just grinding out some midlevel whatever career and cruising comfortably. If that ticks all your boxes then by all means go hit up a bank job.

By the time I left I couldn't drink enough liquor in a day to rinse the stench of that job off me. If I hadn't managed to slip that place I'd be dead of liver failure by now.

It's the secret for a long life for some folks, but it ain't for everybody.