Honest question: do you feel comfortable knowing that your job is doing something which is essentially net zero value to society? Negative in fact, you're burning resources which are needed elsewhere, and contributing to concentration of wealth.
Not being rude or judgemental, just want to know how you feel about this.
I think your question makes some incorrect factual assumptions, but also it incorporates a world view that I don't subscribe to (not wrong, but also not what I believe).
I think that if I had your belief system and your set of facts, I would probably feel uncomfortable about it.
The world view is simply that this technology arms race performs no useful work to society. It's simply people with capital investing enormous sums into gaming a system and extracting $$. Okay, this so far is not even a view, it's just how things are. The "view" is that it is wrong x) Much like one could argue that e.g. the yacht industry diverts resources and people from other more pressing needs.
As for "my" set of facts... well they're just facts :) not "mine" or "yours".
This is a pretty loaded question to then say "not trying to be judgemental"...take out the bias if that's actually the case:
"What kind of benefit do you believe your work provides to society?" or "How do you justify the extra resources taken away from society that may be more beneficial elsewhere, such as X?"
Well I don't know how to make it less loaded x) It's just how things are, it's a work that does no useful work in any meaningful sense, but serves to make some already fabulously rich people even richer (in fact, it extracts that value from non-HFT traders, so even those are shafted here).
My point is that I'm curious regarding how the people who work in these things feel about their job. Do they think they're doing a right thing? Do they "own it" to themselves that they don't care as long as they make money? Do they not think about it too much?
I'd argue that “how do you justify” is more loaded. “Do you feel comfortable with [objective description of the reason one might be uncomfortable with it]?” is better than how I'd ask it.
Intuitively, providing more flow + allowing more efficient allocation of resources via algo is pretty valuable to society. Problem is that society is squandering that efficiency.
The stock market is about allocation of profits, and high-frequency trading is about extracting profits from the profit allocation system. This isn't investment we're talking about; this is the stock market.
Not being rude or judgemental, just want to know how you feel about this.