They need ethics training!!1
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)
#22I 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.
As mentioned in other posts, on average PMs are more experienced than average SWEs (there are far fewer PM roles so it's easy to restrict the hiring pool to only exerperienced/senior candidates). This doesn't mean PMs make more than SWEs of equivalent experience, and frequently they don't.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#23Wait until you see how much the sales people rake in.
Or get the best of both worlds: Work at a company where engineers receive direct profit sharing for their contributions.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#24This 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.
Also, 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.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#25Boy, 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 $$$.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#26In 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 pr…
Project manager and product manager are not the same thing.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#27They need ethics training!!1
True, but doesn’t everyone, really?
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#28This 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.
Exactly. An engineer with 10 years experience, will usually be an EM who probably earns more or equal to a PM
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#29In 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 pr…
Middle management here. Can confirm. These are thankless jobs...especially if the product is rocky. Since product is as much art as science everyone thinks they can do it.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#30In 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 pr…
Project manager and product manager are not the same thing.
Which they acknowledged