Should you be doing this kind of work ?

A good process outline is to change variables through a range and see how sensitive your conclusion is to them. If you haven't done at least half of these, of something like them, then the chances that you've made a bad decision are worryingly high.

Quant careers can be very lucrative and interesting, but not for everyone, and you need to evaluate your chances of actually enjoying it This is not an exhaustive list of course, you have personal preferences and you've made assumptions, and as we have seen for the last year assumptions can really go badly wrong.

Questions
For instance if quanting paid the same as teaching, would you prefer that ?

If you knew for a fact that at 40, you'd have to leave this line of work ?

If you believed you'd only ever work in small unknown firms ? That is I believe now a much more probable event.

If the ratio of maths to IT was 1:50 ? What value could you cope with as a long term position ?

You'd have to work in some shit place like Birmingham or Frankfurt ? Are you flexible on location ?

What if you maximum pay was known to you in advance, and was (say) 200K ?

Would you work for a year free to get into quant finance ?