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?<p>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 companies. In fact, part of my daily job is to prevent passionate engineers from reinventing wheels in the name of achieving scalability. It's not because we don't need to solve scalability problems, but because the infrastructure is good enough for most of companies. Building and operating so called "big data platform" used to be hard, not that hard any more. Building machine learning pipeline used to be hard, not that hard any more for many companies. Of course, it's still challenging to build a highly flexible and automated machine learning pipeline with full support of closed feedback loop, but many companies can get by without that level of maturity.
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.
This is a stupid use of averages.<p>PMs come in a little senior to rank and file programmers. That doesn't mean that a PM of ten years experience makes more than a programmer of ten years.
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.<p>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 pressure. Myself included.<p>Now that's my impression. If you <i>like</i> the job, of course I admire that, and welcome you to collect your reward!
I'm from Levels.fyi - we have a couple hundred entries for PM salaries here as well. From just a glance, it appears that Software Engineers still have higher pay though we admittingly have limited data currently: <a href="https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Product%20Manager" rel="nofollow">https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Product%20Manager</a>
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 frustrating. PMs always come across like they believe they are miniature CEOs.<p>But, all that said... I could never do what they do. Oftentimes PMs are the last guys to leave, working weekends, scrambling for last minute keynotes and honestly pushing out ideas faster than anyone — good or bad. So even though I don’t always like working under a PM, I definitely respect the position and think in general the good ones really deserved the $$$.
As others have mentioned, this is because unlike developers few companies hire PMs straight out of college. As a current PM, I'm actually fairly bearish about the sustainability of this role as far as a long-term career outlook goes. It's an extremely nebulous role, hard to prove your value, wildly differs from company to company, and most of your time will probably not look anything like what is considered textbook "product management."
In other news, CEOs are the highest paid workers in Silicon Valley.<p>This is a seniority thing not a "this function is more valuable" thing.
I'm not sure -- because I haven't had a chance to look at the raw data and the article doesn't make it clear -- but it's possible that "software engineers" is a broad enough category to have a bottom-heavy distribution, which would drag down the median.
You have to adjust for seniority. For example, new grads are not usually hired into PM roles. If you compare a Ln SWE to a Ln PM (at least at FAANG companies where I have experience) SWE's will almost always earn more than PMs
Product management is a strategic role and in companies wired up in the increasingly standard Agile feature factory approach, they are the gatekeeper to what development builds and they effectively steer R&D effort.
The #s and charts make no sense. Also the data is from "offered salary" and H1B Labor certs?<p>Here's some real data (from last year). Someone here at HN started this anonymous spreadsheet that has captured REAL Salaries and Comps for Product Managers worldwide.<p>Show/Ask HN: Anonymous Global Product Manager Salary List (docs.google.com) by @walthall on Aug 16, 2017
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031426" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15031426</a><p>Direct Link to Google Docs Spreadsheet => <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1miQZp0_ckiPgkxH5_PUTdkUgf6tCzKIzVYplNyAjkhM/edit#gid=0" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1miQZp0_ckiPgkxH5_PUT...</a><p>Granted there are only 67 data points, but it would be really cool if someone here can do the number crunching and arrive at more realistic #s and averages :)
I felt ill just looking at the office plan in the lead picture (your keyboard slots in between two monitors facing the other way...).<p>Are there places in SV with open offices that dense?
I worked as a junior PM at Microsoft and eventually moved to Applied Science. My feel is that the junior PM role isn't necessarily needed & most tech organizations would benefit from a very small group of senior PMs. The junior PM role mostly involves syncing the dev team with the expectations of leadership which means you have to be good measuring dev progress (via scrums, task management, unblocking the dev team) and measuring product progress (via customer interactions, metric reviews, leadership review meetings).<p>The good qualities for such a role is to be a clear communicator and someone who gets shit done and doesn't work on pointless things.<p>However, I'd argue that anyone at any company should have these skills. I get that we're trying to make environments more amenable to introverts who don't necessarily want to be bothered with meetings and focus on code, but I also don't see how any pure non research organization can achieve this realistically. You're always going to be bombarded with requests to do all sorts of stuff, you'll have opinions about what's important and what isn't and you should be able to communicate it or else you'd be seriously mismanaging both your career and your product.
As an engineer, I've worked with far more gifted engineers than product managers. The for the good ones is intense. Let's be honest, most companies don't actually need unicorn engineers. They can't afford them, so they get by with solid contributors. Second-tier engineering will eventually bite you in the ass, but without excellent product management, you won't live long enough to experience that pain.
PMs are often founders of acquired companies. You could easily have a CEO of a $50m acquisition come in and be a Dir-level PM or whatever and paid >$1mm/yr in total comp (due to how you handle earn-out, etc.)
This makes complete sense to me. Product Managers are more in tune with the domain, the customer, the business, the design, and the product marketing.<p>As the level of abstraction rises, I believe people will move towards a role that looks more like a Technical Product Manager with design chops.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>The worst, though, are the ones who loose interest in the company's cash cow to go chasing imaginary trends that never materialize.
According to this article the highest paid worker in Silicon Valley, a product manager, earns $133k a year on average.<p>For comparison purposes, I suggest you take a look at US News Best Jobs, which contains a roundup of BLS data by region. Here's a sampling of some other salaries for the Silicon Valley area:<p><a href="https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings" rel="nofollow">https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings</a><p>The top paying market for software developers (the #1 job, apparently) is San Jose, at $133k a year median pay.<p>Physician Asst: $138k a year in Santa Rosa CA<p>Nurse Practitioner (#4): $158k/yr in San Francisco, CA<p>Registered nurse (#18): $138k/yr in San Francisco<p>Lawyer (#33): $193k/yr in San Jose (top market)<p>This is median, rather than average, and is a bit more recent than the $133k cited in the article. There are other factors of course, pay isn't the only thing that matters, stability, age discrimination, working environment, possibility of doing good. The median doesn't include the upper range for high talent (I think nursing salaries tend to be more compressed around the mean, whereas lawyer and programmers have longer tails).<p>But overall, the data doesn't really support the notion that programmers are especially well paid when compared to fields available to skilled and educated people, including in (perhaps especially in) Silicon Valley.
Since salaries change with time, I think it's important to mention this article is from 2016. Although it's still probably true, we should add the date to the title.
Who else thinks this article sounds fishy? Well, the numbers sound quite low. Nothing is mentioned about stock, RSUs, options, bonuses. Nothing is mentioned about sample sizes or the statistical significance of the delta.<p>Comp is very heavy tailed! This makes computing averages very noisy and skewed to the right. If you don't understand understand any of this, or don't show error bars around your estimate, stop writing misleading articles please.<p>Please also compare apples to apples. I.e. control for seniority, experience, large vs small company bias etc. Don't compare apples with oranges (as PMs are less likely to be found in smaller companies, where SW eng have lower salaries).<p>So many ways this kind of math can go wrong. The salary deltas are so small (vs person-to-person variability), let's ignore this BS article please?
I can only think of product managers deserving such high salaries for customer facing products. They can act as translators between end users and engineers. Having worked on purely backend ML code, I find PMs to be mostly clueless about how the product is built. Even after spending years on a product they may not understand simple things like names of different components and what they do. Even during quarterly planning meetings, which is the PMs time to shine, half of the ideas on the table can be dismissed for being impractical and the other half require some data collection to dismiss. At least for backend work I think a Tech Lead can do all the tasks of a PM.
I really hope someone on HN has a more in the trenches view of this and why?<p>Maybe more engineers should leverage the unique advantage of their skill-set: passive income from coding projects? Assuming they want to make more money than PMs.
This not Silicon Valley but in my company product managers start in a higher bracket than engineers. They also seem to have a steadier career progression. They seem to get promoted more regularly.
How do you become one? I always assumed Product Managers should be former engineers, but looks like business folks have taken over it. I am not a good engineer but I really excel at production. In fact, what keeps me employed is the fact that I can see an idea through almost every time.<p>But whenever I look at PM jobs, I have exactly zero qualifications for them.<p>Not to mention the interview process is much, much easier and in fact most of the jobs you apply to does not need a "LeetCode grind" but confidence in your prior experience.
They say data scientist salaries are the highest but I’ve also found the most noise in data science applicants. I have found a lot of candidates who can do something absolutely amazing with Tensorflow. I have found zero, and thus hired none, who can answer my real question: “I collect every conceivable bit of data on my customers and their actions. I lose 6% every month, using this data tell me why and what might fix it.”
I remember my colleague saying at a company I worked for: Managers get fired, developers don't.<p>If you want job security, don't become a manager.
Is a PM similar to the PO (product owner) role using the agile definition? It seems to me that PM's have a higher level view and take responsibility for the whole product (for instance, the PM of Gmail) while in Agile the PO is taking responsibility for an individual scrum team, which might be a handful of developers, maybe some QA, etc.
I'm not sure this is a fair comparison though since PMs usually are experienced when junior software engineers are common, and even more you can have SE switching to PM roles but the opposite is quite rare. But the reality remains that is way more difficult to find a good PM than a good SE.
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.
These salaries seem way too low. We need to demand higher salaries as developers. Supply and demand. We are needed. We save money. We make companies lots of money. We should be compensated much higher. At least if we are good at it and not just average.
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.
Negotiating compensation is a social skill not a technical one, which means this tells us that product managers are generally stronger than software engineers on social skills. That certainly tracks with my own observations.
Not surprising. Product managers are typically part of the Profit section of a company. Software engineers are a Cost, even though without them a company wouldn’t even get off the ground these days.
I wished more companies outside the valley knew they need a product, not a project manager. I'm again doing product while hired as project (and that was how I knew it would be).
When I worked at the BBC, they were called "Producers", even in tech terms. Suspect that capable producers find themselves well paid in any field.
There are far more engineering roles than product manager roles, it’s far less stressful to be an engineer, and it’s tricky to continue along that PM career path because your knowledge gets specialized by industry. These articles make young grads salivate and plan their career all wrong.
I changed careers from software development to product management. The pay is marginally higher in PM roles, but it comes with significant downsides. If I switched back to a SDE role I could easily retain 80% of my compensation with literally half the work. In short: Don't look to product management as easy money.<p>Here are some of the downsides:<p>Product management is middle management. You're squeezed from above and below at the same time. Much has been written about upper management putting unfair demands on middle management, but that's usually a failure of upward communication. That's somewhat easy to solve. The real problem is that it only takes 1 or 2 ruthless rockstar engineers to derail a project. Companies know that genuine top-1% engineers are hard to come by, so they let a lot of bad behavior slide. I was shocked that the majority of politics within my role came not from the top as I naively expected, but from a handful of IC engineers who wanted to backseat drive.<p>Product management requires cooperation across the entire company, but you only have authority over a small fraction of the people required to get a product out the door. Getting my own team to deliver on time is easy. Getting all of the other upstream and downstream dependencies to line up is a political negotiation nightmare. On an average week I might spend more time holding other teams like marketing, devops, logistics, HR, and legal accountable for their part of the deal.<p>Being in product management is a great learning experience with a lot of exposure to new skills, but I can feel my software engineering abilities atrophy by the day. After a few years of a PM role, I'm very concerned that I wouldn't be able to return to a SDE job without investing a lot of time into interview practice.<p>There are fewer product manager roles out there. When I was a software engineer I never worried about finding a new job if I had to. As a product manager, I'm always worried about competing for one of the few product manager roles at other companies. On the other hand, good product managers are hard to come by, so a solid PM track record is golden if you can find a role that fits.<p>Finally: It's a very thankless job. Most weeks I feel like I spend 80% or more of my time just preventing things from going wrong. Come review time, there's not much to show for time spent mitigating potential disasters. Some of the worst product managers try to be the hero by only stepping in after catastrophic failures, at the expense of the company. Don't try to play that game. The key here is to constantly hone your communication skills within the company and to hold other teams accountable when they fail to deliver.<p>All in all, I enjoy the role and the work is rewarding. I wouldn't recommend product management to someone who is just looking for a salary bump, though.
I quit a laser company in Mountain View that never promoted engineers for a laser product manager job in Boston.
My new salary was $53k. In 1983. Things are not as good now. Do the math.