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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)

#11

Post by justboxing »

The #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

Direct Link to Google Docs Spreadsheet => 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 :)

Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)

#13

Post by selfselfself »

aetherson wrote: post #2

This 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.

Agree, 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

Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)

#14

Post by analog31 »

In 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!

Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)

#15

Post by maxxxxx »

barrkel wrote: post #7

Product 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.

From 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.

Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)

#17

Post by mazatta »

c0nsumer wrote: post #8
rc_hadoken wrote: post #3

I 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 worki…

A 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".

Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)

#18

Post by Zaheer »

I'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

Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)

#19

Post by alistairSH »

aetherson wrote: post #2

This 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.

Yeah, 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.

Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)

#20

Post by ghaff »

c0nsumer wrote: post #8
rc_hadoken wrote: post #3

I 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 worki…

Furthermore, PMs are often customer facing. In my experience, they're often the people you bring in when the account manager wants to have roadmap and other relatively technical discussions.

There are degrees of seniority like everywhere else of course. But, in my experience (was a PM for hardware systems for a number of years), they're not typically right-out-of-school.

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