What are the “trophy jobs” in tech?

This part is interesting if thinking about other ratios that could develop.

> Sometimes it’s easier to spot a trophy job in retrospect. For example, when someone has a trophy job and its status drops, their desire to do it decreases a lot. It’s common for people to lose motivation when they’re unhappy with their job's substance, but with trophy jobs, satisfaction is tied most to status (e.g. of their role, the company, industry).

So the current jobs that supposedly could soon be replaced by ML/AI will or are dropping in status, possibly also in valuation and satisfaction with perceived substance. What's funny is that the actual substance of work and expertise hasn't changed. Even if I had a quickly responding LLM, I'd still be tweaking inputs, outputs and reinterpreting to make it as I see fit. Not much if at all easier than just writing it.

I suppose these could become high substance, low status jobs (always were?). Artists are mixed in that their status level depends on which circle you talk with.

Not nearly as fun or easy as it looks

Also, you underestimate how difficult it is to get technical people to talk about tech to multiple audiences, including non-tech people.

Also also, many of the good devrel folks in the industry _do_ have code in production; they just wanted something different than doing engineering day in day out. (Think of the person doing devrel at Tailscale, for example; they are very technical).

It's not a trophy job; it's just more extroverted and people-facing.

Principal engineer at a FAANG for sure.

As someone considering a similar pivot, I'd be interested in hearing about your move into PM from engineering!

My company is kind of unique and I just urge you to throughly research the company, culture, and situation. I'm a hybrid product/engineering manager, while everyone else is strictly product manager with engineering counterparts.

Long story short, this company is in the middle of being cleaned up by private equity. It used to be a cost center, and has never made money in its history. In my opinion, engineers were allowed to do whatever they wanted with no oversight. There were some god-awful, appalling business and engineering practices here.

Honestly, I didn't really absorb all the red flags. I was more enamored with the idea of a career change and trying something different. I think I was particularly targeted for the role because I was previously an engineering manager. My product is universally hated and had been left for dead. I've had to milk everything I can from one real engineer and several data/business analysts to get it resurrected. Part of that is mentoring the DA/BAs how to do basic git branches and commits while butting heads with the engineer to get him to stop doing psychotic things. Just this morning we got into it because I stopped allowing direct pushes to master.

Honestly, this situation is such depressing, pain in the ass, but the moments where I get to be a real PM has been pretty fun. Just listening to customers and relaying what we're doing different has been rewarding.