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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)

#231

Post by airstrike »

gnulinux wrote: post #174
airstrike wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if it's a 2,000% hike with 100% more stress?

I think there is definitely a stress ceiling after which I wouldn't accept any paycheck to let me do the job. But this is my personal opinion, I would imagine more stress => less demand on the job market => higher paycheck. For me, money isn't the end goal, but a necessary part of the adventure. When you play RPGs you don't try to make crazy money, you make enough to buy things you want in the game. That's kinda sort…

I hear you... Money isn't the end-goal for me either. I'm just hoping I'll be able endure the stress long enough so I can retire early (at age ~50) and enjoy a virtually stress-free retirement but we'll see...

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

#232

Post by city41 »

Having lived in Silicon Valley for 4 years now, I find salaries here complex. You get really different results depending on where you look. For example, the big, established companies that are competing with each other for talent pay a lot more than startups do.

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

#233

Post by anon_0bviously »

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…

Totally disagree. In my experience across three tech firms, Product Managers spend a lot of time selling themselves. They are

talking to customers (read: networking for their next job),

going to conferences (read: shmoozing with their next potential boss),

researching competitors (read: figuring out where to apply)

researching products (read: learning on the job)

Is it any surprise they tend to make more than people stuck in the office coding?

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

#234

Post by lostlogin »

samontar wrote: post #223
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…

It’s just terminology from acting. Wouldn’t read too much into it. Getting annoyed by that is like being upset you have a team in your org called HR. “Human Resources? Am I just a unit of raw material to be put through the factory?!”

> Am I just a unit of raw material to be put through the factory?!”

Yes. This one is accurate.

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

#235

Post by ghaff »

Stryder wrote: post #200
codingdave wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Supervised learning using a variety of different neural network pipelines is doing some genuinely impressive things from a business perspective. But not much beyond that at this point (again, from a business perspective).

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

#236

Post by tristor »

I went from being a Senior Engineer to being a Product Manager, and I have seen my pay decline slightly comparatively. But I'm also new as a PM and was very senior as an Engineer, so may not command the salaries that some can as a PM and I had an outsized salary as an Engineer.

Just anecdotally though this doesn't seem to be true in my experience and observation. The highest paid people in most of the tech companies I've been in have been Director+ senior management, followed by Architect and then Senior Engineer staff, followed by PMs and Senior Manager, and then everyone else kind of trails down from there.

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

#237

Post by WalterSear »

lostlogin wrote: post #234
samontar wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s just terminology from acting. Wouldn’t read too much into it. Getting annoyed by that is like being upset you have a team in your org called HR. “Human Resources? Am I just a unit of raw material to be put through the factory?!”

> Am I just a unit of raw material to be put through the factory?!” Yes. This one is accurate.

I prefer the term 'Human Accounting' myself.

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

#238

Post by riazrizvi »

dependsontheq wrote: post #224
riazrizvi wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth", said Kennedy, and all the senators rushed the podium, slapped him on the back, and popped champagne, as they realized the hardest part was done.

But it was the hardest part wasn’t it? Nobody since then managed to get that commitment for a space program.

And if only Napolean or Hitler had managed to get enough 'commitment' for their plans to conquer Europe, they would be sitting pretty right now? Yeesh.

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

#239

Post by ghaff »

not_real_acct wrote: post #176
gnulinux wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same problem. I'm actually intentionally underpaid because this way (1) I have less anxiety about getting fired (2) I have less problems with imposter syndrome (3) I worry less about being underpaid since I know I'm underpaid. I know most people will think this is extremely irrational, but I'm paid about 3 times more than I can spend (I live very cheap and am happy this way) so I already save 2/3 of my tak…

In my experience, there's very little correlation between salary and longevity. There definitely seems to be a correlation between salary and "demand." For instance, Kubernetes is really hot right now, and there's a limited supply of people who know it, so people that know it can make upwards of $200K. OTOH, you could be the world's greatest Windows admin and you'll be lucky to make half that, because there's a milli…

Yes, although you always need to be looking toward the future. The market for Y2K consultants, even "world class" ones, wasn't so good in 2002. (Admittedly for a variety of reasons in addition to the obvious one.)

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

#240

Post by jahaja »

samontar wrote: post #223
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…

It’s just terminology from acting. Wouldn’t read too much into it. Getting annoyed by that is like being upset you have a team in your org called HR. “Human Resources? Am I just a unit of raw material to be put through the factory?!”

I disagree. To be clear, there's more to techs current flight towards the sun than just this. But for this kind of wording to be possible there need to be certain conditions present. In techs case; partly just a general boom/bubble. If you'd post searches for "talent" without these conditions present you'd likely be laughed out of the building, or at the very least come of as dorky, bordering unreliable.
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