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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)

#181

Post by chillacy »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #132
ryandrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#182

Post by hyperrail »

sokoloff wrote: post #76
joker3 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "The salary advantage for product managers has only grown, says Hired’s data scientist Jessica Kirkpatrick. 'We see that software engineers have always been paid less than product managers, but that the pay gap has widened over the past year,' she wrote by email. The trend holds after accounting for experience. Software engineers, on average, are paid about 10% less than product managers in their fi…

What is the typical overall experience of a product manager in their first year vs the overall experience of a software engineer in their first year? No one is getting a product manager title at 21 right out of college. Lots of people are getting SWE titles at 21 right out of college.

Microsoft hires program managers (what other tech firms call product managers) straight out of college. Almost all of the PM-I employees I met at Microsoft were college hires with CS degrees who had taken few or no business or marketing classes.

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

#183

Post by lallysingh »

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 just impressed you got your son in bed by 8pm...

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

#184

Post by shawndumas »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #132
ryandrake wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

a lot of FAANG-a-likes structure compensation in parts. base salary alone is not the whole picture. RSUs are anywhere from 50% to 100% of salary and vest quarterly or monthly. yearly bonuses are 15% to 25%.

at the low end a person making 130k in base is pushing 200k total comp.

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

#185

Post by gwbas1c »

It's very hard to get a good product manager. Some can't "color within the lines" when presented with the limitations of an API that a product needs to work with. Others let their imagination run away. Others think the product is "about them" and use the product as their personal art project. Some don't understand scale, and either set scalability targets too small or too high.

The worst, though, are the ones who loose interest in the company's cash cow to go chasing imaginary trends that never materialize.

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

#186

Post by Jach »

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…

Related to #1, I'd also suggest stop using the phrase "should be" in respect to "earning" / "paid", at least if the goal is to reduce anxiety or plan on how to accept or change the number. If it's just complaining, though, "should" language is pretty natural and fine...

The amount you get paid is a fact. It's comparable to other facts, but the comparisons themselves are also just facts. Maybe they and other facts will help you make a case for raising it (or to your manager, a case for lowering it), but if those arguments are couched in "should" language they are probably less likely to succeed.

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

#187

Post by codingdave »

stuartaxelowen wrote: post #147
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…

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.

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

#188

Post by jahaja »

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 satisfies our own grandiose self-importance.

> "On the other hand, how many companies desperately need product talents to figure out what is valuable to produce?"

These middle-management positions are so unmeasurable that I think they may be greatest source of bullshit jobs in tech. So if it's true that their success is largely unmeasureable, I wonder how you've come to that conclusion?

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

#189

Post by fredgrott »

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…

mainly because while we all go through the same basic CS-math foundations in HS...most never learn how to apply them...

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

#190

Post by dasil003 »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #120
dasil003 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old are your kids? A word of advice: your kids will never be impressed by what you do, to them you could be POTUS and it would just be the normal set point for them. What they will remember is whether you cared more about your work than you did them.

Completely disagree. Kids need attention from their parents but a lot less that you might think. Best way to raise them is by example. Sure, if you never spend time with them that’s bad, but you don’t need to spend 5 hours every night with them either.

You're putting words in my mouth, I was talking about showing interest, you're talking about "5 hours a night". I repeat the question: how old are your kids?
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