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The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
- aetherson 8y agoThis is a stupid use of averages. PMs come in a little senior to rank and file programmers. That doesn't mean that a PM of ten years experience makes more than a programmer of ten years.
- sparuchuri 8y agoThis. Compounded by the fact that most companies don't hire PMs until they're more mature (aka more able to pay higher compensations), the methodology is pretty broken.
- amyjess 8y agoOne thing I've noticed is that companies generally have fewer PMs than software engineers. A company might have a whole team of engineers but only one PM, and the PM typically has a title like "Director of Product Management". So it gives the impression that product manager is a director-level position. But eventually as the company grows, they'll eventually hire more PMs who report to the Director of Product Management the same way the software engineers report to the Director of Software Engineering.
- pmiller2 8y agoI think this has some merit. I’ve seen ratios from 3:1 to 10:1 engineers to PMs at companies I’ve been at. I could imagine the ratio going even higher. Edit: this does raise the question, though: where do product managers come from? What does the career path of a PM look like, including what happens before they become PMs?
- NearAP 8y ago1) Straight from Business Schools - Folks who go into technology tend to become PMs after their MBAs 2) Internal transfers - Software Engineers switch to PM 3) Management/Technology Consultant -> PM: Folks switch from consulting (where they are implementing products designed by vendors) to becoming PMs in the vendor companies.
- doublescoop 8y agoThe internal transfers is much broader than just SWE to PM, as well. UX designers, technical writers, QA testers, etc. Anyone working on a dev team might start picking up PM responsibilities and make that transition at some point.
- ryandrake 8y ago(was a product manager, now a project manager but could move back to my old role pretty easily) I came over to the dark side from software development. Was tired of implementing other people’s bad ideas and convinced product leadership at my company that I could be an idea guy myself (along with all the other footwork and juggling you need to do as a PM). So it was an internal transfer. I think the good PMs have strong hands-on “actual development” backgrounds. I realize this is a self-serving opinion, too.
- shostack 8y agoWhat made you then decide to switch to project management?
- ryandrake 8y agoAn opportunity came up and I thought I’d try it. The jury is still out but I think the role fits me better—project management seems to be more execution oriented than creative idea-generating. I’m also a big believer of being a generalist, so any opportunity to wear a new hat is welcome!
- opportune 8y agoIt totally depends on what problems you’re trying to solve. Engineering managers often end up performing many duties of a PM, and in smaller companies the only PMs you may need are the founders/executives Most PMs I know are former software engineers (or if hired as PMs out of school, studied computer science) with good people skills and high level knowledge of what they help coordinate. I would hate to work with an MBA-type PM who couldn’t appreciate technical problems and solutions
- selfselfself 8y agoAgree, I'm a PM at a top software/internet company and engineers with half of my experience make greater package... Amazon is a mixed bag but FB, Linkedin (prior to acuisition), Google, Netflix all skew towards SWEs making higher packages when experience & performance are comparable
- alistairSH 8y agoYeah, I wondered about that. The PMs with whom I work all have 15+ years experience in the business. And for most of them, "the business" is our specific domain area, not just "software". I would expect their salaries to be in the same ballpark as a senior engineer or line manager.
- alistairSH 8y agoAlso, the senior PMs all straddle the line between sales, consulting/services, and R&D. They tend to spend a lot of time in the company booth at conferences, dealing with client C-levels one-on-one, and working with our sales to team to ensure R&D is building stuff that will generate revenue. Their day-to-day interaction is with VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE mores than with us plebes. There shouldn't be any surprise that these are highly compensated positions.
- naravara 8y agoWell, it's the challenge of finding one person who can talk sales/marketing language to executives as easily as they can talk with their technical teams all while being highly organized and capable of managing a team. They don't need to be masters at any one of those things (aside from organization and management), but they need to be well above average at all of them, which is rare nexus of talents to find. Also, experience and skills like that are usually earned through entry-level work in other fields. Most of the good PMs I work with came up through other career paths (like non-profits, academia, print or tv production, paralegals, etc.) that are typically not so well compensated. They make lateral moves into product management for financial reasons, and they top out quickly. The highest paid PMs I know were mostly just former engineers themselves.
- jimbokun 8y agoIf anything, I'm surprised the salaries aren't higher than what's reported in the article.
- alistairSH 8y ago$133,000 is baller money anyplace but SV and the other high-cost cities. Also, the article is discussing salaries - I can't say for sure, but I'd bet PMs frequently have significant bonus eligibility, so that $133k could easily be $150k+ in actual annual income. And the numbers in the article appear to be national, not limited to SV (despite the headline)... "...31,146 interview requests from 1,848 companies made through Hired’s platform..." "...Analyses of H1B work visas and Glassdoor data from Google, Facebook..."
- dmode 8y agoExactly. An engineer with 10 years experience, will usually be an EM who probably earns more or equal to a PM
- denzil_correa 8y agoHence, you look at distributions - not averages.
- rajacombinator 8y agoIndeed PMs are actually generally undercompensated relative to their importance to a company.
- joker3 8y agoFrom the article: "The salary advantage for product managers has only grown, says Hired’s data scientist Jessica Kirkpatrick. 'We see that software engineers have always been paid less than product managers, but that the pay gap has widened over the past year,' she wrote by email. The trend holds after accounting for experience. Software engineers, on average, are paid about 10% less than product managers in their first year as well as after six or more years of experience." So it's not just a matter of PMs being more experienced.
- xxpor 8y agoI wonder how experience is corrected for. Someone who comes in here as a PM usually has previous job experience and an MBA. So someone who has been a PM for a year != SDE for one year.
- sokoloff 8y agoWhat is the typical overall experience of a product manager in their first year vs the overall experience of a software engineer in their first year? No one is getting a product manager title at 21 right out of college. Lots of people are getting SWE titles at 21 right out of college.
- hyperrail 8y agoMicrosoft hires program managers (what other tech firms call product managers) straight out of college. Almost all of the PM-I employees I met at Microsoft were college hires with CS degrees who had taken few or no business or marketing classes.
- killerdhmo 8y agoI was a PM straight out of college and know many PMs straight out college. Both at the big companies like Google and smaller companies.
- tristor 8y agoThat's a fair point. I make less as a PM than I did when I was an Engineer, but I had 13 years of engineering experience before I transitioned. All of the new PMs I've worked with have a minimum of 5 years of experience in some other related role and most have a related degree.
- autokad 8y agoit doesn't mean it, but there is evidence to it being true. According to sallaries on glass door, in sanfrancisco with 10-14 years exp: Product Manager: 145k$ Web Developer: 110k$ Software Engineer: 135k$
- huac 8y ago135k is almost what many new grad software engineers make now, before considering stock. those numbers look very wrong
- aetherson 8y agoGlass door is slippery. Job titles can be really specific. But obviously it is not the case that a software engineer with 10+ years of experience, in San Francisco, makes $135k.
- rc_hadoken 8y agoI really hope someone on HN has a more in the trenches view of this and why? Maybe more engineers should leverage the unique advantage of their skill-set: passive income from coding projects? Assuming they want to make more money than PMs.
- c0nsumer 8y agoGood PMs have a much broader scope and much greater knowledge of the business -- the problems the engineers are tasked with solving -- than many engineers do. When doing a good job they bring together the technical might of the engineers, the designers/architects of the system, and the business folks to be sure something is completed when needed, the way it needs to be done. A good, technical PM who is great at working with people can link together folks with a wide range of skills and make sure stuff gets done. This is worth a lot of money. (Conversely, a bad PM will absolutely kill a project, through a slow and painful process that'll make everyone involved want to quit.)
- mazatta 8y agoA good PM knows that all they should own is the definition of "what" should be worked on, but the bad ones seem to gravitate towards the "how" as well. I suspect this has something to do with many PMs transitioning out of engineering roles, but it can be very frustrating to work with a "Product Micromanager".
- NearAP 8y agoIt depends on the company. For some companies, the PM is responsible for "what" should be built and "how" (functional how) it will behave. Developers then try to implement the PM's "how" and then there's a back and forth between Dev and PM. For example, Dev might say - there's a better way to achieve this but it will change the functional behavior; or if we implement what you want, the page load time will be slow so is it OK if we do it this other way... At the end of the day, the PM's focus is - how will the average user use this product, what does the average user expect this product to do. That is generally not Dev's focus. Dev's focus is typically - what is the best way to get this done so that application loads quickly, doesn't place undue stress on the server, etc. Sometimes, Dev doesn't pay attention to how the UI looks, they just care that the code runs efficiently
- gammarator 8y agoI felt ill just looking at the office plan in the lead picture (your keyboard slots in between two monitors facing the other way...). Are there places in SV with open offices that dense?
- lukejduncan 8y agoAgreed. The pic looks more like a university resource center / library / computer lab.
- chasedehan 8y agoThis has to be some data entry type position - old Dell monitors and every seat taken.
- gowld 8y agoMany of them are wearing red-ribboned lanyards, have water bottles (and no other drinks), and all visible monitors are running the same IRC-looking app, so it's probably some sort of training/class at a conference or a college programming contest. The photo is a stock photo.
- CDRdude 8y agoThe image has more information in the metadata: >Contestants in the 2006 Google Global Code Jam stare at their computer screens at Google's New York office Friday, Oct. 27, 2006. One hundred of the best computer coders from around the world compete for prize money and bragging rights. The finalists from 20 countries are flown to New York by Google for the competition. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
- hinkley 8y agoUsually the HVAC system can’t handle this many bodies. Also, OSHA has rules about the ratio of bathrooms to humans of either gender are available and I’m pretty sure some of these employers are way over the limit. Good argument for reducing density or at least increasing gender equality in your open office plan.
- jawns 8y agoI'm not sure -- because I haven't had a chance to look at the raw data and the article doesn't make it clear -- but it's possible that "software engineers" is a broad enough category to have a bottom-heavy distribution, which would drag down the median.
- jbob2000 8y agoThere are people in my organization who’s job is purely to file tickets with IBM and they have titles that would be captured under “software engineer”. So yes, totally agree with you. It seems that if you work on a computer with anything that isn’t graphics or Microsoft office, then you are a software engineer.
- gautamnarula 8y agoAs an example of this, there are many explicitly "new grad" SWE positions in companies of all sizes, but new grad PM roles really only exist at large tech companies and even then are rare in comparison.
- err0ne 8y agoWait until you see how much the sales people rake in.
- meritt 8y agoOr get the best of both worlds: Work at a company where engineers receive direct profit sharing for their contributions.
- henryfjordan 8y agoI'm having a hard time picturing this as anything but standard stock/option grants negotiated per employee. How do you correlate a particular individual's contributions to profit in software? And even if you could really understand how much value everyone was contributing, how would you ever keep a cooperative atmosphere? If me sharing a good idea with you potentially costs me money, I'm suddenly going to stop talking in meetings.
- meritt 8y agoMy company takes precisely this approach, though our business model (we sell data products) and size (we're quite small) definitely makes it easier. There are usually 1-2 employees (engineer and analyst) responsible for a given product so calculating their respective contribution and profit-sharing on a per-product basis is quite straightforward.
- instaheat 8y agoWhere? I have been doing inside sales for 3 years. Looking to move.
- sjg007 8y agoMove to outside sales. Or sales engineering.
- lozaning 8y agoEnterprise hardware sales is incredibly lucrative, and even more cutthroat. The closer you are to the actual customer the more money you'll make. The sales guy at the VAR who actually knows the customer makes the most, followed by the sales guy at the manufacturer, then any SE's, then maybe inside guys.
- barrkel 8y agoProduct management is a strategic role and in companies wired up in the increasingly standard Agile feature factory approach, they are the gatekeeper to what development builds and they effectively steer R&D effort.
- maxxxxx 8y agoFrom what I have seen this is the case in theory but I have't seen many product managers who really can pull this off. The few that can do it are worth a lot though.
- justboxing 8y agoThe #s and charts make no sense. Also the data is from "offered salary" and H1B Labor certs? Here's some real data (from last year). Someone here at HN started this anonymous spreadsheet that has captured REAL Salaries and Comps for Product Managers worldwide. Show/Ask HN: Anonymous Global Product Manager Salary List (docs.google.com) by @walthall on Aug 16, 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031426 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031426 Direct Link to Google Docs Spreadsheet => https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1miQZp0_ckiPgkxH5_PUTdkUgf6tCzKIzVYplNyAjkhM/edit#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1miQZp0_ckiPgkxH5_PUT... Granted there are only 67 data points, but it would be really cool if someone here can do the number crunching and arrive at more realistic #s and averages :)
- the_watcher 8y agoIt looks like someone hid all the data points in the sheet and Google Sheets isn't giving me an option to unhide. Am I missing something?
- refurb 8y agoDownload and turn the filters off.
- maxxxxx 8y agoThis not Silicon Valley but in my company product managers start in a higher bracket than engineers. They also seem to have a steadier career progression. They seem to get promoted more regularly.
- tombert 8y agoThis. A couple years ago I was promised a promotion that I didn't get because of "budgetary reasons". I find it funny that despite that, literally every PM that I met managed to get promoted.
- maxxxxx 8y agoMy theory is that engineers are too honest, take new initiatives too literally or simply not politically savvy. Everybody complains about title inflation but the engineering department is the only department that actually does something about it. We have the same with travel expenses. My department does often not even do necessary travel while everybody else goes to "offsite" meetings and "kickoffs" and a ton of other stuff all the time.
- repolfx 8y agoEngineering is a discipline that requires and rewards rigour. It isn't just travel budgets. Just compare how you do hiring vs those other departments, or how work is reviewed, or assigned, or performance measured. I bet you anything the engineering teams will be vastly more systematic, frugal and rigorous than marketing, HR, PM, account managers etc.
- analog31 8y agoIn my view, they can have it. I was a project manager (granted, a slightly different title and role) for a couple years. I went back to the bench. Fortunately I took a pay hike in both directions. Those middle management jobs seem to be super high stress, long hours, and low reward. Literally everybody I've known who went into one of those jobs did so upon the birth of their first kid, when they felt the financial pressure. Myself included. Now that's my impression. If you like the job, of course I admire that, and welcome you to collect your reward!
- alistairSH 8y agoProject manager and product manager are not the same thing.
- madrox 8y agoWhich they acknowledged
- gowld 8y agoThey are more than "slightly" different. A product manger is a creative professional. A project manager is an administrative professional.
- p1esk 8y agoNot really. When I had a "product manager" title, I had to do plenty of "project management".
- ryandrake 8y agoIt’s almost as if the roles are a little bit different at each different company! I’ve worked places with a single person doing these roles, and places where they were separate people. Also worked places without someone doing them, and that situation is consistently awful.
- 8y ago
- gautaml 8y agoArticle is from 2016...
- dang 8y agoOuch, missed that. Belatedly added.
- outside1234 8y agoIn other news, CEOs are the highest paid workers in Silicon Valley. This is a seniority thing not a "this function is more valuable" thing.
- rc_bhg 8y agoI'm still not convinced that the average CEO actually does any work. So calling them a "worker" is a stretch.
- p1esk 8y agoProduct managers are actually not that "senior" in the corporate ladder. They have lots of responsibility without much authority.
- paxy 8y agoThey are on average more senior than engineers though, because product manager isn't usually an entry level role.
- crimsonalucard 8y agoThe "manager" title makes it seem like it's more senior across the board. This perception influences their salaries.
- Zaheer 8y agoI'm from Levels.fyi - we have a couple hundred entries for PM salaries here as well. From just a glance, it appears that Software Engineers still have higher pay though we admittingly have limited data currently: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Product%20Manager https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Product%20Manager
- volkadav 8y agoThank you for levels.fyi! It's been a handy tool as a hiring manager here trying to translate to our HR department why we should bring people in at level X vs. level Y. (For those of you reading this who haven't ever been a hiring manager at a bigco, there's a whole negotiation dance we tend to have to do with our internal HR department that you as a candidate don't see. This is why giving us hard data on what your other offers might look like, for example, helps us knock sense into the bean counters. Whee!)
- titanomachy 8y agoThat makes sense, my FAANG offer wouldn't budge an inch until I sent them a screenshot of my competing offer. Immediately got another 20% after that.
- yarrel 8y agoThey need ethics training!!1
- hbosch 8y agoBoy, do I hate PMs. It’s as if almost every PM I’ve had to deal with isn’t particularly proficient in business, programming, or design management but knows exactly enough of all 3 silos to be dangerous at once to the other two. More often than not, I’ve found a PM will try to steer a project with some compromise to dev and design and bias toward business — in my selfish opinion as a single-silo employee, it’s mostly frustrating. PMs always come across like they believe they are miniature CEOs. But, all that said... I could never do what they do. Oftentimes PMs are the last guys to leave, working weekends, scrambling for last minute keynotes and honestly pushing out ideas faster than anyone — good or bad. So even though I don’t always like working under a PM, I definitely respect the position and think in general the good ones really deserved the $$$.
- pmiller2 8y agoA good PM, almost by definition is kind of a mini-CEO. Their job is to push the product forward in a way that serves the company’s business interest. Product management is not engineering, design, sales, or marketing, but takes all of those into account. Maybe you’ve never worked with a good PM?
- QuercusMax 8y agoThis is exactly what I've heard for some very senior (L8-10+) folks at Google: if you think of a product development team like a company, the Product Manager (PM) is the CEO, Tech Lead (TL) is CTO. If you have a Program Manager (PgM), they may act as COO. In fact, when startups are acquired, this is often exactly how their C-suite ends up: CEO -> PM, CTO -> TL, COO -> PgM.
- brogrammernot 8y agoSpeaking as a PM with 5 years of engineering across the stack at decently big companies, I would say that it’s my job to push towards a bias for business value and the TL + engineering members job to push back when it’s time to prioritize the tech debt. Trust me, I’d love to dig into the code (and most of the engineering team doesn’t realize I read their PRs + code every day still so I’m well aware when they’re sane-bagging) but the goal of a well run team is push/pull. I can weigh the benefits of a product feature from the business and engineering tech debt, retention, etc angles and I do from time to time when the team doesn’t step up but I’m going to be biased towards shipping business value because I’m the umbrella that catches all the praise and the shit-storm when things go wrong. You need a ton more victories to survive in PM world then you do in Eng world. It’s easier to be mediocre in Engineering then product b/c you’re gone after the 2nd or third bad launch.
- fierro 8y agoYou have to adjust for seniority. For example, new grads are not usually hired into PM roles. If you compare a Ln SWE to a Ln PM (at least at FAANG companies where I have experience) SWE's will almost always earn more than PMs
- strictnein 8y agoLn?
- kod 8y agoLevel N, e.g. Level 1 for new hire, level 5 for principal, etc
- 40acres 8y agoIs a PM similar to the PO (product owner) role using the agile definition? It seems to me that PM's have a higher level view and take responsibility for the whole product (for instance, the PM of Gmail) while in Agile the PO is taking responsibility for an individual scrum team, which might be a handful of developers, maybe some QA, etc.
- DavidAdams 8y agoThey're not exactly the same. A skilled Product Manager is going to make a particularly good Product Owner, but PO is more of a role on the project, while PM is a role in the organization.
- L_Rahman 8y agoUnder "SAFe Agile" POs quasi report into PMs. PMs own products that different scrum teams are developing. POs own the scrum teams and work with the PM to translate the PM's requirements into the scrum team.
- dawhizkid 8y agoAs others have mentioned, this is because unlike developers few companies hire PMs straight out of college. As a current PM, I'm actually fairly bearish about the sustainability of this role as far as a long-term career outlook goes. It's an extremely nebulous role, hard to prove your value, wildly differs from company to company, and most of your time will probably not look anything like what is considered textbook "product management."
- luckydata 8y agoI'm exactly in the same boat. I love the job when I actually get to do what the ideal product manager job should be. It's very stressful, not very rewarding and it's very unstable work because EVERY fuckup down the chain will just be absorbed by the PM. We're always the first in line to be fired if someone else decided not to do their job (can be Eng, marketing, sales... doesn't matter).
- dawhizkid 8y agoYeah...I'm looking into sales engineering
- L_Rahman 8y agoThis seems to be the most common outcome amongst product people looking for an out. Sales Engineering has that "talk about the business," "talk about the tech," "talk about the people" flavor but with directly measurable outcomes, high transferability across jobs, and depending on commission structure and company - 2x-3x pay.
- ryandrake 8y agoYea one of the major up/downsides of being the PM is the buck usually stops at you. Priduct couldn’t deliver on its promises? PM is accountable. Product couldn’t sell? PM. Product getting bad press? PM. Product succeeds wildly? PM.
- luckydata 8y ago
- anontechworker 8y agoWhat about engineering managers? I’m betting the average tops both PMs and SWEs.
- throwaway080383 8y agoAt my and other FAANG companies, this is necessarily true. EM track runs parallel to SWE track in terms of total comp, but there is no EM equivalent to the junior SWE roles.
- reggieband 8y agoI swear, every time I read an article on HN about salary it gives me anxiety. I'm perpetually worried that I'm not earning as much as I should be earning. I don't think it is healthy but I can't look away.
- rebolek 8y agoI'm not worried, I know it.
- moneil971 8y agoIf you are making enough to live comfortably and save for the future, you're doing better than the majority of the population, don't worry about the comparisons!
- tw1010 8y agoNever evaluate yourself based on an abstracted metric of a population, without considering inescapable underlying correlated factors in the negative direction. (If all you know is reported salaries from anonymous people, then you don't know how much stress this distribution of people are under, and you don't know what tradeoffs they've had to make that you might not be willing to make, such as enough free time to enjoy the world of literature for instance.)
- gnulinux 8y agoI have the same problem. I'm actually intentionally underpaid because this way (1) I have less anxiety about getting fired (2) I have less problems with imposter syndrome (3) I worry less about being underpaid since I know I'm underpaid. I know most people will think this is extremely irrational, but I'm paid about 3 times more than I can spend (I live very cheap and am happy this way) so I already save 2/3 of my take home paycheck. At this point, having better mental health and working in a nice company that lets me solve hard software problems is the most important thing, imho.
- Sharlin 8y ago> I know most people will think this is extremely irrational I think that's perfectly reasonable. I find it hard to believe it would be "extremely irrational" to most people. Maybe I'm underestimating the extent to which money is fetishized in your culture (I presume the US). Also, being able to save 2/3 of your net salary is... a ludicrously privileged position, underpaid or not.
- Judgmentality 8y agoSince salaries change with time, I think it's important to mention this article is from 2016. Although it's still probably true, we should add the date to the title.
- asaph 8y agoI noticed the old date too. However I don't think it's a given that PMs make more than engineers in 2018.
- rdl 8y agoPMs are often founders of acquired companies. You could easily have a CEO of a $50m acquisition come in and be a Dir-level PM or whatever and paid >$1mm/yr in total comp (due to how you handle earn-out, etc.)
- fipple 8y agoThey say data scientist salaries are the highest but I’ve also found the most noise in data science applicants. I have found a lot of candidates who can do something absolutely amazing with Tensorflow. I have found zero, and thus hired none, who can answer my real question: “I collect every conceivable bit of data on my customers and their actions. I lose 6% every month, using this data tell me why and what might fix it.”
- tom_b 8y agoThat sounds quite depressing. Would you be willing to share your problem description as given to candidates here? I will say that I have several friends who work in various industries addressing your real question and none of them would be particularly identified as a "data scientist."
- paxy 8y ago> I have found zero, and thus hired none, who can answer my real question That's because it isn't the job of a data scientist to answer that question. Their task is getting you the numbers. You need an "MBA type" to figure out what to do with it (analyst, business development/strategy, product manager etc.)
- dominotw 8y agoWhat's the answer
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago"I asked 100 users and 65 of them quit because of all the telemetry"
- L_Rahman 8y agoThat's because it's the product manager's job to tell the data scientist what kind of customer behavior they want pulled out of the data.
- sophiebits 8y agoI would guess that low-paying employers also hire fewer PMs because, so a larger fraction of PMs end up working at large, well-paying companies.
- rajeshpant 8y agoIn the other news, software engineers are the lowest paid workers in tech companies.
- mboperator 8y agoThis makes complete sense to me. Product Managers are more in tune with the domain, the customer, the business, the design, and the product marketing. As the level of abstraction rises, I believe people will move towards a role that looks more like a Technical Product Manager with design chops.
- g9yuayon 8y agoThis hardly comes as a surprise. How many companies, especially startups, really need to tackle tough technical challenges? On the other hand, how many companies desperately need product talents to figure out what is valuable to produce? In addition, engineers have commoditized many technical solutions that used to be challenging in the past 15 years. Scaling used to be a tough challenge, not any more for many companies. In fact, part of my daily job is to prevent passionate engineers from reinventing wheels in the name of achieving scalability. It's not because we don't need to solve scalability problems, but because the infrastructure is good enough for most of companies. Building and operating so called "big data platform" used to be hard, not that hard any more. Building machine learning pipeline used to be hard, not that hard any more for many companies. Of course, it's still challenging to build a highly flexible and automated machine learning pipeline with full support of closed feedback loop, but many companies can get by without that level of maturity.
- someguydave 8y agoWhy should engineers agree to work for a regular salary from you? Why wouldn't they hold out for ownership in your product venture?
- g9yuayon 8y agoSupply and demand? My assumption is the less challenging a technical project becomes, the more supply of engineering talents can work on the project. There should be more generalists after all. And dynamics of supply and demand will determine if engineers will be able to "hold out for ownership".
- someguydave 8y agoWhat, precisely, limits the supply of people who have "product talents to figure out what is valuable to produce"? Why are are people with such skills apparently more rare than people with technical skills?
- 8y ago
- debt 8y agoHow do you become a product manager from being an engineer?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- znpy 8y agoSerious, honest question: what does a product manager do?
- NearAP 8y agoSee these links 1) https://www.forproductmanagers.com/5686683802533888/who-is-a-product-manager-part-1/ https://www.forproductmanagers.com/5686683802533888/who-is-a... 2) https://www.forproductmanagers.com/5658962204557312/who-is-a-product-manager-part-2/ https://www.forproductmanagers.com/5658962204557312/who-is-a...
- pm_throwaway 8y agoI changed careers from software development to product management. The pay is marginally higher in PM roles, but it comes with significant downsides. If I switched back to a SDE role I could easily retain 80% of my compensation with literally half the work. In short: Don't look to product management as easy money. Here are some of the downsides: Product management is middle management. You're squeezed from above and below at the same time. Much has been written about upper management putting unfair demands on middle management, but that's usually a failure of upward communication. That's somewhat easy to solve. The real problem is that it only takes 1 or 2 ruthless rockstar engineers to derail a project. Companies know that genuine top-1% engineers are hard to come by, so they let a lot of bad behavior slide. I was shocked that the majority of politics within my role came not from the top as I naively expected, but from a handful of IC engineers who wanted to backseat drive. Product management requires cooperation across the entire company, but you only have authority over a small fraction of the people required to get a product out the door. Getting my own team to deliver on time is easy. Getting all of the other upstream and downstream dependencies to line up is a political negotiation nightmare. On an average week I might spend more time holding other teams like marketing, devops, logistics, HR, and legal accountable for their part of the deal. Being in product management is a great learning experience with a lot of exposure to new skills, but I can feel my software engineering abilities atrophy by the day. After a few years of a PM role, I'm very concerned that I wouldn't be able to return to a SDE job without investing a lot of time into interview practice. There are fewer product manager roles out there. When I was a software engineer I never worried about finding a new job if I had to. As a product manager, I'm always worried about competing for one of the few product manager roles at other companies. On the other hand, good product managers are hard to come by, so a solid PM track record is golden if you can find a role that fits. Finally: It's a very thankless job. Most weeks I feel like I spend 80% or more of my time just preventing things from going wrong. Come review time, there's not much to show for time spent mitigating potential disasters. Some of the worst product managers try to be the hero by only stepping in after catastrophic failures, at the expense of the company. Don't try to play that game. The key here is to constantly hone your communication skills within the company and to hold other teams accountable when they fail to deliver. All in all, I enjoy the role and the work is rewarding. I wouldn't recommend product management to someone who is just looking for a salary bump, though.
- User23 8y agoNegotiating compensation is a social skill not a technical one, which means this tells us that product managers are generally stronger than software engineers on social skills. That certainly tracks with my own observations.
- aj7 8y agoI quit a laser company in Mountain View that never promoted engineers for a laser product manager job in Boston. My new salary was $53k. In 1983. Things are not as good now. Do the math.
- sepehrhm 8y agoHow do you become one? I always assumed Product Managers should be former engineers, but looks like business folks have taken over it. I am not a good engineer but I really excel at production. In fact, what keeps me employed is the fact that I can see an idea through almost every time. But whenever I look at PM jobs, I have exactly zero qualifications for them. Not to mention the interview process is much, much easier and in fact most of the jobs you apply to does not need a "LeetCode grind" but confidence in your prior experience.
- pm_throwaway 8y agoStartups can be a good opportunity to jump into the deep end of product management. Startups tend to appreciate engineering backgrounds more than business backgrounds in my experience. On the other hand, startups have a much higher risk of failure in general. Inside bigger companies, the key is to demonstrate progressively more ownership and leadership over time. If your boss mentions an idea or critical need, put together a proposal for how you would accomplish it. Take ownership of difficult projects and knock them out of the park. Get good at concise reporting and presentation skills, because communication is 50% of the job.
- shadowtree 8y agoDepends on the type of software, but for anything enterprise you should start in consulting/implementation. Best bet is the service orgs within product companies. Learn the industry, learn the customers, learn the product. Get vocal about enhancement, inch closer to the PM team. Get hired, done. Worked for me and a large chunk of the PM team I hired since then.
- asaph 8y agoThis article is from 2016. The title should be updated to reflect that.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- baxtr 8y agoInteresting. Has anyone come across really well written job descriptions for what PMs really do?
- anon49124 8y agoI'll only be worried when celebrity chefs make more than CEOs. Oh wait, nm.
- gwbas1c 8y agoIt's very hard to get a good product manager. Some can't "color within the lines" when presented with the limitations of an API that a product needs to work with. Others let their imagination run away. Others think the product is "about them" and use the product as their personal art project. Some don't understand scale, and either set scalability targets too small or too high. The worst, though, are the ones who loose interest in the company's cash cow to go chasing imaginary trends that never materialize.
- foobaw 8y agoConsidering PMs are considered mini-CEOs (which I actually don't agree with), this has some reasoning behind it. As a startup founder, knowing what to build is one of the hardest things ever and having a knack at this is valuable.
- acjohnson55 8y agoAs an engineer, I've worked with far more gifted engineers than product managers. The for the good ones is intense. Let's be honest, most companies don't actually need unicorn engineers. They can't afford them, so they get by with solid contributors. Second-tier engineering will eventually bite you in the ass, but without excellent product management, you won't live long enough to experience that pain.
- eibrahim 8y agoThese salaries seem way too low. We need to demand higher salaries as developers. Supply and demand. We are needed. We save money. We make companies lots of money. We should be compensated much higher. At least if we are good at it and not just average.
- city41 8y agoHaving lived in Silicon Valley for 4 years now, I find salaries here complex. You get really different results depending on where you look. For example, the big, established companies that are competing with each other for talent pay a lot more than startups do.
- tristor 8y agoI went from being a Senior Engineer to being a Product Manager, and I have seen my pay decline slightly comparatively. But I'm also new as a PM and was very senior as an Engineer, so may not command the salaries that some can as a PM and I had an outsized salary as an Engineer. Just anecdotally though this doesn't seem to be true in my experience and observation. The highest paid people in most of the tech companies I've been in have been Director+ senior management, followed by Architect and then Senior Engineer staff, followed by PMs and Senior Manager, and then everyone else kind of trails down from there.
- paulgrant999 8y agoI posted the Silicon valley range was about 120 to 160, with a high of 190.... and got downvoted. from the article: Online hiring platform Hired released a report on Aug. 25 analyzing 31,146 interview requests from 1,848 companies made through Hired’s platform during the first half of 2016. Their findings show product managers consistently get the top salary offers, $133,000 on average. Software engineers were offered an average of $123,000 followed by designers at $115,000 during the second quarter of 2016. Analyses of H1B work visas and Glassdoor data from Google, Facebook and other tech giants arrive at similar conclusions. -- next time, don't be so ignorant.
- d0m 8y agoMakes sense to me.. PM are like mini-CEO of a product. Great ones make such a big difference and are a joy to work with.
- dangjc 8y agoThere are far more engineering roles than product manager roles, it’s far less stressful to be an engineer, and it’s tricky to continue along that PM career path because your knowledge gets specialized by industry. These articles make young grads salivate and plan their career all wrong.
- formalsystem 8y agoI worked as a junior PM at Microsoft and eventually moved to Applied Science. My feel is that the junior PM role isn't necessarily needed & most tech organizations would benefit from a very small group of senior PMs. The junior PM role mostly involves syncing the dev team with the expectations of leadership which means you have to be good measuring dev progress (via scrums, task management, unblocking the dev team) and measuring product progress (via customer interactions, metric reviews, leadership review meetings). The good qualities for such a role is to be a clear communicator and someone who gets shit done and doesn't work on pointless things. However, I'd argue that anyone at any company should have these skills. I get that we're trying to make environments more amenable to introverts who don't necessarily want to be bothered with meetings and focus on code, but I also don't see how any pure non research organization can achieve this realistically. You're always going to be bombarded with requests to do all sorts of stuff, you'll have opinions about what's important and what isn't and you should be able to communicate it or else you'd be seriously mismanaging both your career and your product.
- beerlord 8y agoHow do you become a senior dev if there are no junior devs? A healthy company will maintain this pipeline, to keep fresh talent and fresh ideas coming in. Plus, getting down and dirty at the coalface is essential experience for a product manager.
- torgian 8y agoNot surprising. Product managers are typically part of the Profit section of a company. Software engineers are a Cost, even though without them a company wouldn’t even get off the ground these days.
- hendry 8y agoI remember my colleague saying at a company I worked for: Managers get fired, developers don't. If you want job security, don't become a manager.
- speby 8y agoThis is absolutely untrue and poor advice.
- peteretep 8y agoWhen I worked at the BBC, they were called "Producers", even in tech terms. Suspect that capable producers find themselves well paid in any field.
- xivzgrev 8y agoEvery biz type person I know dreams of product mgmt. I figured it was because they can be mini CEO (power) but seems pay isnt so bad either
- starchild_3001 8y agoWho else thinks this article sounds fishy? Well, the numbers sound quite low. Nothing is mentioned about stock, RSUs, options, bonuses. Nothing is mentioned about sample sizes or the statistical significance of the delta. Comp is very heavy tailed! This makes computing averages very noisy and skewed to the right. If you don't understand understand any of this, or don't show error bars around your estimate, stop writing misleading articles please. Please also compare apples to apples. I.e. control for seniority, experience, large vs small company bias etc. Don't compare apples with oranges (as PMs are less likely to be found in smaller companies, where SW eng have lower salaries). So many ways this kind of math can go wrong. The salary deltas are so small (vs person-to-person variability), let's ignore this BS article please?
- t_fatus 8y agoI'm not sure this is a fair comparison though since PMs usually are experienced when junior software engineers are common, and even more you can have SE switching to PM roles but the opposite is quite rare. But the reality remains that is way more difficult to find a good PM than a good SE.
- anotheryou 8y agoI wished more companies outside the valley knew they need a product, not a project manager. I'm again doing product while hired as project (and that was how I knew it would be).
- geebee 8y agoAccording to this article the highest paid worker in Silicon Valley, a product manager, earns $133k a year on average. For comparison purposes, I suggest you take a look at US News Best Jobs, which contains a roundup of BLS data by region. Here's a sampling of some other salaries for the Silicon Valley area: https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings The top paying market for software developers (the #1 job, apparently) is San Jose, at $133k a year median pay. Physician Asst: $138k a year in Santa Rosa CA Nurse Practitioner (#4): $158k/yr in San Francisco, CA Registered nurse (#18): $138k/yr in San Francisco Lawyer (#33): $193k/yr in San Jose (top market) This is median, rather than average, and is a bit more recent than the $133k cited in the article. There are other factors of course, pay isn't the only thing that matters, stability, age discrimination, working environment, possibility of doing good. The median doesn't include the upper range for high talent (I think nursing salaries tend to be more compressed around the mean, whereas lawyer and programmers have longer tails). But overall, the data doesn't really support the notion that programmers are especially well paid when compared to fields available to skilled and educated people, including in (perhaps especially in) Silicon Valley.
- deebeeoh 8y agoPm is not unlike sales. It's a function with a strong value but which has metastasized because of compensation. Everyone knows the path to CEO and top compensation is ( roadly)through pm. Which means it attracts all sorts of people whose primary quality is that they want to come out on top. They don't make good PM's, they often don't have strong engineering or business backgrounds...and there are a ton of them. The ultimate downfall of the software industry will be from our over reliance on the army of mediocre PM's growing each day....
- justfor1comment 8y agoI can only think of product managers deserving such high salaries for customer facing products. They can act as translators between end users and engineers. Having worked on purely backend ML code, I find PMs to be mostly clueless about how the product is built. Even after spending years on a product they may not understand simple things like names of different components and what they do. Even during quarterly planning meetings, which is the PMs time to shine, half of the ideas on the table can be dismissed for being impractical and the other half require some data collection to dismiss. At least for backend work I think a Tech Lead can do all the tasks of a PM.