The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
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Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#2This 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.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#3I 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.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#4I'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.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#5This 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.
This.
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.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#6Wait until you see how much the sales people rake in.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#7Product 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.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#8I 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.
Good 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.)
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#9I'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.
There 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.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#10This 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.
One 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.