The highest paid workers in Silicon Valley are product managers (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 8:53 PM UTC

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".

[deleted]

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

#202

Post by foobaw » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 8:54 PM UTC

Considering PMs are considered mini-CEOs (which I actually don't agree with), this has some reasoning behind it. As a startup founder, knowing what to build is one of the hardest things ever and having a knack at this is valuable.

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

#203

Post by payne92 » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 8:54 PM UTC

jahaja wrote: post #188

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…

What's up with this usage of the word "talent"? Tech is in such acute need of humble pie I don't even know where to begin. I'm becoming disillusioned. Why is a programmer etc. a "talent", but a carpenter just an employee, hire or whatever? But maybe it's actually an appropriate term, now when our interview processes so clearly have ceased to be job interviews, and have become auditions - because nothing less satisfie…

...because the skill gap between “ok”, “good”, and “great” is so much bigger for some jobs (software development) than it is for other jobs (carpentry).

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

#204

Post by x220 » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

samstave wrote: post #113

robviren wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a job where your goal is to try disappoint people most slowly. You are pretty much rigged to disappoint everyone. Gotta spread that around though. Marketing, sales, and the business end all have expectation of perfect execution, on-time delivery, bug free, and the development, testing, support teams all just want realistic requirements and timelines. Somewhere in the middle is the island of slight disappointmen…

This was very well put. And one of the hardest topics to navigate in an interview process: "how would you handle a case when peron X is failing to meet requirement Y or delivery date Z? I freaking hate this question as there is no magic answer aside from "whatever it takes to minimize the overall negative impact of the outcome for the company/project/product"

That's a lot like asking "how would you turn water into wine?" Manage expectations and deal with angry people (aside from, in your example, mitigating those failures in the future).

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

#205

Post by Stryder » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 8:56 PM UTC

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.

The key is to accept that you'll never "earn as much as you should", let it go, and just live your life, find problems worth solving, and solve them. The rat race pays you one price in your hand while simultaneously taking another one out of your back pocket.

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

#206

Post by x220 » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

truebosko wrote: post #79

analog31 wrote: post #14

In 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…

Middle management -- this hits home hard. Switched to People Manager / Product Manager / Many Other Hats role around the birth of my child. I find it quite rewarding, but yes, endless hours and high stress. It's also an adjustment from programmer life when you had very short feedback loops, but now as a manager no one ever tells you "Hey, you're doing a good/bad job here!" and instead, you have to just read every sit…

I'm honestly confused why you work that much. Are you getting a lot of company stock? Whatever your % increase in salary was cannot be realistically worth the extra time and mental effort you are spending.

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

#207

Post by brogrammernot » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 8:58 PM UTC

hbosch wrote: post #25

Boy, 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…

Speaking as a PM with 5 years of engineering across the stack at decently big companies, I would say that it’s my job to push towards a bias for business value and the TL + engineering members job to push back when it’s time to prioritize the tech debt.

Trust me, I’d love to dig into the code (and most of the engineering team doesn’t realize I read their PRs + code every day still so I’m well aware when they’re sane-bagging) but the goal of a well run team is push/pull.

I can weigh the benefits of a product feature from the business and engineering tech debt, retention, etc angles and I do from time to time when the team doesn’t step up but I’m going to be biased towards shipping business value because I’m the umbrella that catches all the praise and the shit-storm when things go wrong.

You need a ton more victories to survive in PM world then you do in Eng world. It’s easier to be mediocre in Engineering then product b/c you’re gone after the 2nd or third bad launch.

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

#208

Post by acjohnson55 » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 8:59 PM UTC

cannam wrote: post #139

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.

I find them endlessly fascinating as well. My feelings are 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 or…

> Stop using the word "earning". We get paid, we don't necessarily earn our pay.

Beautifully put. I kind of want to frame this, because it captures the brutal honesty of compensation.

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

#209

Post by padthai » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

payne92 wrote: post #203

jahaja wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's up with this usage of the word "talent"? Tech is in such acute need of humble pie I don't even know where to begin. I'm becoming disillusioned. Why is a programmer etc. a "talent", but a carpenter just an employee, hire or whatever? But maybe it's actually an appropriate term, now when our interview processes so clearly have ceased to be job interviews, and have become auditions - because nothing less satisfie…

...because the skill gap between “ok”, “good”, and “great” is so much bigger for some jobs (software development) than it is for other jobs (carpentry).

You would be surprised how hard is and how many years takes to be a good cabinetmaker.

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

#210

Post by enjo » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

payne92 wrote: post #203

jahaja wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's up with this usage of the word "talent"? Tech is in such acute need of humble pie I don't even know where to begin. I'm becoming disillusioned. Why is a programmer etc. a "talent", but a carpenter just an employee, hire or whatever? But maybe it's actually an appropriate term, now when our interview processes so clearly have ceased to be job interviews, and have become auditions - because nothing less satisfie…

...because the skill gap between “ok”, “good”, and “great” is so much bigger for some jobs (software development) than it is for other jobs (carpentry).

It's not tho.

It's really not. Most of the software you use every day was developed by very average software developers. The vast majority of the work software developers do isn't terribly novel or particularly difficult. And you know what? They do just fine. Things work well. Systems stay on line. Companies make money.

I've seen too many "bad" teams produce perfectly functional software over the years to think that this gap exists anywhere but in Joel Spolsky essays.

I think comparing carpenters to software engineers does a disservice to carpenters. Software developers to me are more like dry-wallers. A really good one can do it faster, but the end result mostly always looks the same.

The difference between an average and a great carpenter, however, is immediately obvious. There is real craftsmanship there, and you can clearly see the difference.

It isn't until you get to the edges of software development that those same differences become clear. When you're dealing with very high scale, very aggressive performance metrics, or very difficult mathematical concepts you see the difference between average and great developers. But those are less than a fraction of 1% of software projects I'd wager.

* I should note: I'm a software developer.