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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)

#191

Post by hinkley »

gammarator wrote: post #51

I felt ill just looking at the office plan in the lead picture (your keyboard slots in between two monitors facing the other way...). Are there places in SV with open offices that dense?

Usually the HVAC system can’t handle this many bodies.

Also, OSHA has rules about the ratio of bathrooms to humans of either gender are available and I’m pretty sure some of these employers are way over the limit. Good argument for reducing density or at least increasing gender equality in your open office plan.

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

#192

Post by Stryder »

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…

We are quite literally running out of productive things to do so we (the collective group) are all currently micro-optimizing everything we can lay our hands on. It's like a pond that's shrinking with all the fish gasping for air.

A paradigm shift is necessary before we end up strangling ourselves.

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

#193

Post by Fomite »

riazrizvi wrote: post #169
someguydave wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally, I wouldn't go that far, I've found a decent number of managers to be value-adding. I think it is more about the sloppy mindset that tends to underplay the contribution of other producers on a team, to instead heavily over-value their own contributions. Engineers can go too far in this way too, of course. Managers can produce strategy, operational efficiency, organizational support for ill-understood proje…

This. A good manager is a force multiplier.

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

#194

Post by someguydave »

riazrizvi wrote: post #169
someguydave wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Personally, I wouldn't go that far, I've found a decent number of managers to be value-adding. I think it is more about the sloppy mindset that tends to underplay the contribution of other producers on a team, to instead heavily over-value their own contributions. Engineers can go too far in this way too, of course. Managers can produce strategy, operational efficiency, organizational support for ill-understood proje…

That doesn't contradict Pournelle's observation. The balance of power tends towards those who work for the organization in most firms.

The bigger question in my mind: why firms at all? If individual PMs are so great, why bother with employees? Wouldn't you rather just contract all the elements of a technical project to other folks for a fixed fee?

I do wonder what portion of good ol' boys and good ol' fashion nepotism tend to fill out the "PM" position on big firm's org charts.

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

#195

Post by twblalock »

chillacy wrote: post #181
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is something I always wonder. Every time salaries come up here the anecdotal numbers batted around as "standard" in Silicon Valley get higher, and every time I neurotically search around the net for corroborating information and find little to none. I don't doubt these high salary figures are real, but I have doubts they represent the median.

Those numbers are probably TC (total compensation) which includes stocks and sometimes bonuses. If you go on Blind you can see people are receiving offers in that ballpark from Facebook and Google, who seem to be in a bidding war of sorts for talent.

All of the valley is in a bidding war for talent right now. I don't think there has ever been a better time to be a software engineer.

There was a while when startups were more attractive for compensation than FAANGs, but the big companies really stepped up their game.

Nowadays you can work at a startup and hope to make a few million dollars in the unlikely event that it IPOs and you got in early enough to have a lot of shares, or you can work at a FAANG and be guaranteed to make a million dollars every 4-5 years, or even more frequently, and you'll have better benefits too.

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

#196

Post by beat »

joshjkim wrote: post #171
beat wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw my spouse go through this a few years back. She was a product manager with 13 years of industry experience in a deep but narrow domain (international e-commerce) when she got laid off. The job hunt was kind of arduous, because we live in the midwest and don't want to relocate, and there just aren't that many jobs in her specialty in our area. Eventually she found one, but it took months. There were plenty of ge…

OT (and pretty random, apologies in advance!) but my company is distributed and might be a good fit for your spouse (we're an international e-commerce marketplace) if interested at all or if she'd like to chat, feel free to hit me up (email in profile!), thanks!

I'll ask her about it. Thanks!

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

#197

Post by x220 »

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".

Figuring out what to do is the hardest part. Engineering is typically the least significant part of the success or failure of a company.

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

#198

Post by ljf »

gnulinux wrote: post #170
Sharlin wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know most people will think this is extremely irrational I think that's perfectly reasonable. I find it hard to believe it would be "extremely irrational" to most people. Maybe I'm underestimating the extent to which money is fetishized in your culture (I presume the US). Also, being able to save 2/3 of your net salary is... a ludicrously privileged position, underpaid or not.

> Maybe I'm underestimating the extent to which money is fetishized in your culture I worked in the Bay Area and currently in Boston. I live in the startup culture. > Also, being able to save 2/3 of your net salary is... a ludicrously privileged position, underpaid or not. Yes! We software engineers are lucky. Even when we're underpaid (I'm paid $90k and my friends with similar experience, same education, same intere…

Amazing saving, at that rate just 10 years away from 'retiring' or living on the same money you give yourself today, forever... http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-of...

Though if I ever get close to this the plan isn't to retire just to have total choice of the work I do.

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

#199

Post by FridgeSeal »

codingdave wrote: post #187
stuartaxelowen wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies still have a very hard time building a good machine learning pipeline.

And most product managers would confirm that most companies do not need a good machine learning pipeline.

Really? Because most product managers I meet are the ones going “how can we put AI and Machine Learning into ?”

I 100% agree that most companies don’t need nearly as much ML as think though.

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

#200

Post by Stryder »

codingdave wrote: post #187
stuartaxelowen wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most companies still have a very hard time building a good machine learning pipeline.

And most product managers would confirm that most companies do not need a good machine learning pipeline.

As an older engineer currently having fun digging into ML: yep, a well thought-out set of good-ol business rules can do a lot of what teams are applying ML to these days.

Nothing wrong with learning new things, though. I can get behind that. It's important to stay intellectually honest, however.

On the other hand, research efforts on vision, language and autonomous systems are genuinely pushing boundaries.

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