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.
Hence, you look at distributions - not averages.
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)
#32Boy, 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…
A 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?
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#33The #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 L…
It 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?
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#34This 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 Managem…
I 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?
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#35Wait until you see how much the sales people rake in.
Where? I have been doing inside sales for 3 years. Looking to move.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#36I'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.
As 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.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#37In 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…
Exactly my situation. I need the pay bump to get us to mortgage free in the next three years or so, at which point I hand in my resignation and seek a programmer job again.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#38I 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…
Good PMs, yes. A few I have worked at previous companies barely understood their own products, how to use them, or their customers. They were over glorified email forwarders. Sometimes they could copy-and-paste to Jira, and maybe take a few screenshots.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#39In 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…
Exactly my situation. I need the pay bump to get us to mortgage free in the next three years or so, at which point I hand in my resignation and seek a programmer job again.
Make sure to keep coding in your spare time. I'm trying to get back to dev work now after 5 years in management land, and I'm finding it difficult to get back to my prior level of productivity. Coding skills age pretty quickly.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 the…
Well, 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.