Since salaries change with time, I think it's important to mention this article is from 2016. Although it's still probably true, we should add the date to the title.
The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
81–90 of 365 posts
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#82This 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.
From the article: "The salary advantage for product managers has only grown, says Hired’s data scientist Jessica Kirkpatrick. 'We see that software engineers have always been paid less than product managers, but that the pay gap has widened over the past year,' she wrote by email. The trend holds after accounting for experience. Software engineers, on average, are paid about 10% less than product managers in their fi…
I’m not sure that that disproves the parent. The PMs I know started as PMs several years into their careers, while most of the SWEs I know started out of school. So a year 1 PM might have 1 year of PM experience, but several more years of relevant career experience and salary history that the year 1 SWE doesn’t have.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#83I'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
Thank you for levels.fyi! It's been a handy tool as a hiring manager here trying to translate to our HR department why we should bring people in at level X vs. level Y.
(For those of you reading this who haven't ever been a hiring manager at a bigco, there's a whole negotiation dance we tend to have to do with our internal HR department that you as a candidate don't see. This is why giving us hard data on what your other offers might look like, for example, helps us knock sense into the bean counters. Whee!)
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#84I swear, every time I read an article on HN about salary it gives me anxiety. I'm perpetually worried that I'm not earning as much as I should be earning. I don't think it is healthy but I can't look away.
If you are making enough to live comfortably and save for the future, you're doing better than the majority of the population, don't worry about the comparisons!
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#85PMs are often founders of acquired companies. You could easily have a CEO of a $50m acquisition come in and be a Dir-level PM or whatever and paid >$1mm/yr in total comp (due to how you handle earn-out, etc.)
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which they acknowledged
They are more than "slightly" different. A product manger is a creative professional. A project manager is an administrative professional.
Not really. When I had a "product manager" title, I had to do plenty of "project management".
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#87I swear, every time I read an article on HN about salary it gives me anxiety. I'm perpetually worried that I'm not earning as much as I should be earning. I don't think it is healthy but I can't look away.
Never evaluate yourself based on an abstracted metric of a population, without considering inescapable underlying correlated factors in the negative direction. (If all you know is reported salaries from anonymous people, then you don't know how much stress this distribution of people are under, and you don't know what tradeoffs they've had to make that you might not be willing to make, such as enough free time to enjoy the world of literature for instance.)
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#88I swear, every time I read an article on HN about salary it gives me anxiety. I'm perpetually worried that I'm not earning as much as I should be earning. I don't think it is healthy but I can't look away.
I have the same problem. I'm actually intentionally underpaid because this way (1) I have less anxiety about getting fired (2) I have less problems with imposter syndrome (3) I worry less about being underpaid since I know I'm underpaid. I know most people will think this is extremely irrational, but I'm paid about 3 times more than I can spend (I live very cheap and am happy this way) so I already save 2/3 of my take home paycheck. At this point, having better mental health and working in a nice company that lets me solve hard software problems is the most important thing, imho.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#89In other news, CEOs are the highest paid workers in Silicon Valley. This is a seniority thing not a "this function is more valuable" thing.
Product managers are actually not that "senior" in the corporate ladder. They have lots of responsibility without much authority.
Re: The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016)
#90I swear, every time I read an article on HN about salary it gives me anxiety. I'm perpetually worried that I'm not earning as much as I should be earning. I don't think it is healthy but I can't look away.
As a Canadian, I've learned to just not worry. I can't compare myself to the creme del la silicon valley crop, and that's ok. And as a millennial "work until I die" seems very natural as well.