> As someone in a middling HFT shop

Hey, since we're on the topic of HFT developers...

How do people break into that area?

I've done a lot of performance-optimization work, so I thought I might be a good candidate for some of those roles.

But for all the job postings I've seen in the past ~4 months, they want significant prior experience developing low-latency systems.

Is this just a temporary thing, where the pool of already-experienced candidates is sufficient?

It's like a middle school dance. If you ask enough people, someone will dance.

Well that helps explain my time in middle school.

There is definitely truth in this. I see lots of ads for senior full stack devs (and devops). Not so much for front end. I wonder why that is.

I think it's easier to get away with not having someone who specializes in front end and so a lot of companies just don't prioritize it. I think a lot of them also don't realize how much they're missing either, but I'm maybe a little biased because I specialize in front end, haha. I do think that this is a contributing factor to why so many websites and web apps work and run so poorly.