Ask HN: Switching from tech startup to finance, dumb move?

Hi HN

I was the first engineer at a tech startup in SV and, after building and leading an engineering team and scaling the company to ~40 people, I was passed on for a promotion, since the founder decided to bring in an experienced VP of engineering to take on the majority of my activities. I don't have anything against this new guy (except that he is not a very talented leader IMHO), but what disappoints me is that I have been completely excluded from every "leadership/management" task without being given any constructive feedback, and I am just expected to quietly switch to an individual contributor role after 3+ years of leading major initiatives.

The whole thing has been very ego-crushing for me, so I made my resume circulate through the help of a well connected recruiter in order to keep my options open. I got in touch with two very famous hedge funds for a backoffice role (cloud computing stuff: modern infrastructure management, rearchitecting of legacy applications, containers, ...) and the interviews have been very mature (no Google style). I got an offer from both places, they are localed in NYC and Chicago so I would have to move.

I have fundamentally two questions:

- What to do with the reasonable number of options I have vested

- Is this really a good career move? Am I just going to be extremely disappointed in a few months? FWIW, I worked in big enterprises before, but software was their core business, never trading/finance

Current employment numbers (startup):

- Salary: 160k

- Bonus: ~10k a year

- Equity: ~1% as ISO (after dilutions), of which I currently vested 80% (the startup is definitely on an upwards trajectory, at the moment exercising those options and paying the AMT tax would cost me around ~100k or more)

New offer by the hedge funds (they are pretty much comparable):

- Salary: 200k

- Bonus:

- 200k a year (minimum guaranteed by the contract, every year)

- 50k sign-on + relocation bonus

Thank you!