He doesn't have till 35. He has until 30 at best. Even if he got to M7, HF/AM don't want guys in their 30s with no experience, especially now that positions have decreased so much due to the shift to passive. And PE is virtually impossible without pre-MBA experience even if you went to a target and then a top AM. Buyside has the luxury of taking target school undergrad kids in their 20s who already have 3.7+ GPAs and multiple internships in BBs/buyside firms; at the MBA level, they'e got the Yale + CS + TPG kids.

The longer he waits, not only does it become harder due to the fact that he is aging, which the industry heavily discriminates against, (in addition to 0 experience in ER/AM/HF/PE, no target school, and no 3.7+ GPA), but also because by the time he even gets close to applying, active will have shrunk another 10-20%. Even now, the industry is far harder to break into than it was just 5 years ago, and the AM/HFs are taking almost no chances on kids who don't have top tier experience anymore.

For instance, I had a family friend who went to get a Harvard MBA 2 years ago. There were a bunch of ex-military guys in his year, with no finance experience and many of which wanted to place into HF's after graduation. Guess how many placed? One. And to make this worse, he got the job because his godfather was CFO of the fund. Almost every single other kid who was placed into an AM/HF that year went to a target school and then had top IB/PE experience. However, investment banks do love ex-military guys, and most of these guys were able to secure offers at IBs.

OP could possibly place into IB if he gets into M7, corporate side with Amazon/Microsoft, etc., or even potentially MBB at the high end. And there are plenty of these high paying jobs available. But buyside simply isn't an option for him anymore. It's barely available for the kids that grinded for the past 8 years, definitely not so for someone who checks zero boxes.