Do we have a future as Quant researcher or Quant developer here in low paying Toronto, Canada? C++ interview test revealed

Do we have a future as Quant researcher or Quant developer here in low paying Toronto, Canada? C++ interview test revealed

So yesterday, I am doing the usual C++ interview process with a recruiter. Upon my surprise, I get an unknown test which actually turned out to be very simple questions. It was with laptop with no internet access and typing away within a Word document.
This was for a security software company owned by Seagate the hard drive maker. The questions were not hard which included what is wrong with this code, and asked to write functions or classes to do:
1. Output to reverse a string array without the use of the Standard Temple Library.
2. Demonstrate a class that could deadlock.
3. Demonstrate a class that would be thread safe.
Other questions involved why certain code would bomb as you pass one type to something that was expected in a different way. The one I was dealt with expected a type of T &. You figure out the answer.
So that brought me to further questions on my potential of entering the quant field without a masters degree or PHD. Where I live here in Toronto, Canada, many banks are very desperate for top level PHD researchers a Canadian banks like Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Captial Markets, Scotia Bank, and Scotia Capitol. I do think this recruiter’s answers were interesting. RBC is a .NET shop while Scotia Bank is a Java shop. I do believe banks like Toronto Dominion are a mix while my experience s of an institutional pension (i.e. Canada Pension Plan Investment Board) is a .NET shop focusing on C#.
A lot of these positions do pay about $150K at PHD level. This recruiter did say you will need to be at a PHD level as you will be working with these types of people. Most of this work can get you a position even if you are in pursuit of a PHD.
As for the salary, the salary is quite high for a Toronto position but it is very low as compared to global financial centers like New York, London, or Chicago. Many of these types of position pay even as high as 150,000 Sterling in London. Please don’t tell me about standard of living in an expensive city like New York or London. People are living quite nicely at earning 40K in large cities like that. That is a copout excuse.
It seems that if you are pursuing a reach position doing models or other analytics, you will need to definitely be at a PHD level in an advanced mathematical, computation, or science (especially physics) if you want to earn the big buck. I just hope I am not too old for this.