I'm a quant with five years' of industry experience from leading buy and sell side institutions. I too have largely grown weary of our industry, primarily due to the overwhelming banality of it all. Being of a scholarly disposition, there are limits to how much happiness I can derive from debugging other people's code libraries, building pipelines, and navigating through Kafkaesque corporate bs.
I like to imagine that the quant skill set will be welcomed in other careers. Data science has infiltrated virtually every industry these days, so this is an obvious exit strategy. Of course, one must ultimately ask oneself whether the grass is indeed greener on the other side, or if the source of one's unhappiness could manifest itself on a broader industrial scale.
