Managing people is where the real money is vs. say, straight programming
Most product managers don't have direct reports.
Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
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Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#32Its an avenue for developers who don't want to code anymore and want to play scrum master. Prob 1/3rd of early career engineers are trying to get out of developer jobs into PM gigs.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#33Managing people is where the real money is vs. say, straight programming
Product management isn’t (or shouldn’t be) a people management position. It’s a cross between inbound marketing, product design, and high-level prioritization/planning.
Done well, it’s essential to creating products people love. Unfortunately, it’s easy to do poorly. Done poorly, it looks like bad project management: shuffling Gantt charts and micromanaging engineers.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#34I have another question: why does a PM make more than a dev? My wife made that jump and her salary went up 50%. She literally just goes to meetings and talks now, yet she makes more than her old job that required real skills. Am I the only person who finds this perverse?
Because at the end of the day its whether your shipping something worthwhile that matters. Not how much you code, nor the brain farts of execs.
Paying for someone who can increase the efficiency of a bunch of other highly paid people is a sound investment. Not that this happens often in reality! A shit show is a shit show even with a paid cat-herder. But it can work very well given the right circumstances.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#35It's an easy way of getting paid more while doing less actual work. Obviously most senior people want to become product managers since they know they will have more to say and get compensated for it.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#36We really struggle to find good PMs. I've noticed a proliferation of low quality PMs (they don't really understand the product; they just act ask a secretary for technical leads and/or users). In particular, I wish we had more opinionated , less passive PMs.
This has predominantly been my experience over the years. A great a PM is worth their weight in gold though!
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#37I heard a statement before a lot of the big tech layoffs were in full swing: "There were a lot of low-interest rate product managers in tech over the past couple years." Don't get me wrong, I think product management is actually the hardest job in tech because it can straddle so many different areas: design, marketing, data analysis, customer relationships, project management, etc. etc. I still think great project ma…
Care to give more details about your third point?
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#38In a recession, where companies give up on the efficacy of their marketing and sales operations, a lot of those positions get cut. When a company merges or gets acquired (often, to improve financial metrics), that enables the company to cut a lot of marketing and sales positions. Product is seen as a position that is seen as a bit more stable. The company still sells the product, current and potential users can still…
PMs are such a hit or miss. I have not seen an average PM in my career. They either are incredibly talented and they can move mountains out of the way of making a great product, or they are a complete black hole of resources focusing on gantt charts and project updates.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#39I have another question: why does a PM make more than a dev? My wife made that jump and her salary went up 50%. She literally just goes to meetings and talks now, yet she makes more than her old job that required real skills. Am I the only person who finds this perverse?
In most companies, PMs make roughly the same as engineers at the same level, so your wife’s situation likely has other factors. Did she make the jump to another company? If so, that’s why, not the ladder switch.
Also, PM requires real skills too, as you can see from a lot of the comments here. Unfortunately most PMs don’t have those skills, so I don’t blame people who don’t know that.
Re: Ask HN: Is everyone becoming a Product Manager these days?
#40What is a PM?
I'm told I am one. Because I am the manager of a piece of software the CTO has passed on to me.
Besides leading the develoment, what should I do?