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

2) Internal transfers - Software Engineers switch to PM

3) Management/Technology Consultant -> PM: Folks switch from consulting (where they are implementing products designed by vendors) to becoming PMs in the vendor companies.

Here are some of the downsides:

Product management is middle management. You're squeezed from above and below at the same time. Much has been written about upper management putting unfair demands on middle management, but that's usually a failure of upward communication. That's somewhat easy to solve. The real problem is that it only takes 1 or 2 ruthless rockstar engineers to derail a project. Companies know that genuine top-1% engineers are hard to come by, so they let a lot of bad behavior slide. I was shocked that the majority of politics within my role came not from the top as I naively expected, but from a handful of IC engineers who wanted to backseat drive.

Product management requires cooperation across the entire company, but you only have authority over a small fraction of the people required to get a product out the door. Getting my own team to deliver on time is easy. Getting all of the other upstream and downstream dependencies to line up is a political negotiation nightmare. On an average week I might spend more time holding other teams like marketing, devops, logistics, HR, and legal accountable for their part of the deal.

Being in product management is a great learning experience with a lot of exposure to new skills, but I can feel my software engineering abilities atrophy by the day. After a few years of a PM role, I'm very concerned that I wouldn't be able to return to a SDE job without investing a lot of time into interview practice.

There are fewer product manager roles out there. When I was a software engineer I never worried about finding a new job if I had to. As a product manager, I'm always worried about competing for one of the few product manager roles at other companies. On the other hand, good product managers are hard to come by, so a solid PM track record is golden if you can find a role that fits.

Finally: It's a very thankless job. Most weeks I feel like I spend 80% or more of my time just preventing things from going wrong. Come review time, there's not much to show for time spent mitigating potential disasters. Some of the worst product managers try to be the hero by only stepping in after catastrophic failures, at the expense of the company. Don't try to play that game. The key here is to constantly hone your communication skills within the company and to hold other teams accountable when they fail to deliver.

All in all, I enjoy the role and the work is rewarding. I wouldn't recommend product management to someone who is just looking for a salary bump, though.

1. Stop using the word "earning". We get paid, we don't necessarily earn our pay. Detach your pay from your perception about the work you do, and detach both from the value in the rest of your life. That may help you to take more money as well, if it turns out that that's what you really want.

2. As sibling comment says, it may be worth taking a pay cut in order to do something niche that interests you. I did this a long time ago and haven't regretted or reversed it. It returns the feeling of control to you.

3. Check out the country-wide or global statistics. I don't get paid all that much by HN standards, but I'm still in the top decile for my (rich) country.

4. People are very good at cutting cloth to what is available, and at making accommodations with it, so long as they are happy in other ways. I've had friends who get paid ten times what I do, and they are still living on the edge - one financial shock or employment setback and they're in trouble. My situation is no less secure than theirs.