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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)

#151

Post by jonex »

kingraoul3 wrote: post #138
jordache wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think as a mathematical comparison. Given a successful product, there are likely way more engineers than product people.

That's assuming the consequent though.

It leads to the supply for any given experience level >0 being smaller for the product people.

Also, even in the 0 experience group, the selection will be tougher. This is independent of the measurable or existing differences in skill. The person that is best at convincing the employer of hiring them as a solo product manager is in a better position to negotiate than the person who managed to be among the five seemingly best developers.

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

#152

Post by sangnoir »

someguydave wrote: post #118
g9yuayon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply and demand? My assumption is the less challenging a technical project becomes, the more supply of engineering talents can work on the project. There should be more generalists after all. And dynamics of supply and demand will determine if engineers will be able to "hold out for ownership".

What, precisely, limits the supply of people who have "product talents to figure out what is valuable to produce"? Why are are people with such skills apparently more rare than people with technical skills?

There's nothing that limits the hypothetical supply of people with relevant skills (innate or with potential to learn). However, there is a limit on the number of people with experience in those roles - and work experience is used as a proxy for determining skills.

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

#153

Post by asaph »

Judgmentality wrote: post #81

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.

I noticed the old date too. However I don't think it's a given that PMs make more than engineers in 2018.

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

#154

Post by L_Rahman »

dawhizkid wrote: post #72
luckydata wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm exactly in the same boat. I love the job when I actually get to do what the ideal product manager job should be. It's very stressful, not very rewarding and it's very unstable work because EVERY fuckup down the chain will just be absorbed by the PM. We're always the first in line to be fired if someone else decided not to do their job (can be Eng, marketing, sales... doesn't matter).

Yeah...I'm looking into sales engineering

This seems to be the most common outcome amongst product people looking for an out.

Sales Engineering has that "talk about the business," "talk about the tech," "talk about the people" flavor but with directly measurable outcomes, high transferability across jobs, and depending on commission structure and company - 2x-3x pay.

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

#155

Post by louiswilbrink »

reggieband wrote: post #73

I 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.

To add to your anxiety: right now might be the best time to negotiate for life-changing salary in your lifetime.

All the market drivers are in place to make companies compete for senior/principle talent. Your salary is always a symptom of these economic drivers, not your tenure in the field.

Your financial well-being will be defined by negotiating during these goldrushes. Taking a “good” salary during these times could be the biggest mistake of your career.

Sleep on that!

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

#156

Post by someguydave »

riazrizvi wrote: post #125
g9yuayon wrote: post #103

This hardly comes as a surprise. How many companies, especially startups, really need to tackle tough technical challenges? On the other hand, how many companies desperately need product talents to figure out what is valuable to produce? In addition, engineers have commoditized many technical solutions that used to be challenging in the past 15 years. Scaling used to be a tough challenge, not any more for many compan…

Waves hand, "We can always throw some more engineers at that part of the problem, what's really hard is figuring out what to do", said the project manager, and the product manager, and the QA manager, and the manager-manager. Meanwhile, talking heads in also ran companies in Silicon Valley continued to sell off stock in the mantra, "Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

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

#157

Post by L_Rahman »

fipple wrote: post #91

They say data scientist salaries are the highest but I’ve also found the most noise in data science applicants. I have found a lot of candidates who can do something absolutely amazing with Tensorflow. I have found zero, and thus hired none, who can answer my real question: “I collect every conceivable bit of data on my customers and their actions. I lose 6% every month, using this data tell me why and what might fix…

That's because it's the product manager's job to tell the data scientist what kind of customer behavior they want pulled out of the data.

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

#158

Post by L_Rahman »

40acres wrote: post #43

Is a PM similar to the PO (product owner) role using the agile definition? It seems to me that PM's have a higher level view and take responsibility for the whole product (for instance, the PM of Gmail) while in Agile the PO is taking responsibility for an individual scrum team, which might be a handful of developers, maybe some QA, etc.

Under "SAFe Agile" POs quasi report into PMs. PMs own products that different scrum teams are developing. POs own the scrum teams and work with the PM to translate the PM's requirements into the scrum team.

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

#159

Post by shadowtree »

sepehrhm wrote: post #146

How do you become one? I always assumed Product Managers should be former engineers, but looks like business folks have taken over it. I am not a good engineer but I really excel at production. In fact, what keeps me employed is the fact that I can see an idea through almost every time. But whenever I look at PM jobs, I have exactly zero qualifications for them. Not to mention the interview process is much, much easi…

Depends on the type of software, but for anything enterprise you should start in consulting/implementation. Best bet is the service orgs within product companies.

Learn the industry, learn the customers, learn the product. Get vocal about enhancement, inch closer to the PM team. Get hired, done.

Worked for me and a large chunk of the PM team I hired since then.

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

#160

Post by Jach »

ryandrake wrote: post #100
reggieband wrote: post #73

I 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.

Don’t sweat these. Every HN salary thread, people come out of the woodwork to note that their sister’s roommate’s brother works at Facebook and makes $300k, therefore all tech workers everywhere in Silicon Valley make that much on average. For some reason, people here love to take outlier employees at outlier companies and hold them up as averages.

Every HN salary thread, you come out of the woodwork with the same rhetoric. See: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/986693536534982659?lang=en

For the lazy: "Median comp package at FB is $240k/yr (this number is skewed low since it's over all employees, not just engineers). Google, Amazon, etc. pay similarly. Combined, these companies employ > 100k programmers in the U.S out of maybe 3M-ish programmers." Directly followed by a screenshot of one of ryandrake's older comments.

FWIW, I don't make $300k, or even $240k (yet) nor work at FAANGM. I also don't live anywhere near the bay area, but that matters less these days (at least if you're in the US). Neither of the numbers are unreasonable targets.

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