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 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.
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".
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
We are quite literally running out of productive things to do so we (the collective group) are all currently micro-optimizing everything we can lay our hands on. It's like a pond that's shrinking with all the fish gasping for air.
A paradigm shift is necessary before we end up strangling ourselves.
"The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." -Henry Ellsworth, US Patent Office Commissioner, 1843
Yep exactly. Especially for smaller, faster growing companies: what you choose to not work on is usually more important than what you choose to work on (once you remove the core work to support the company's current state). Without someone with product experience - usually either a PM or an experienced software leader - adding additional engineers often paradoxically hurts total productivity.
Supply and demand? My assumption is the less challenging a technical project becomes, the more supply of engineering talents can work on the project. There should be more generalists after all. And dynamics of supply and demand will determine if engineers will be able to "hold out for ownership".
Think the key factor is, talented engineers write software that's maintainable, and easier to change, extend & adapt.
This could make the difference between having to do a complete rewrite at great expense, vs a small tweak.
For startup with no customers it's probably fine to cowboy up a solution, then throw away and start again, to find market fit.
But if you've got lots of customers, and you're forced to rewrite because the previous engineers left an unmaintainable mess, it's going to be hugely complex, risky, long & expensive undertaking.
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?
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?!”
"Talent" is now used in the context of recruitment for almost any job that requires some level of skill. E.g. I heard it being used for police officers ("law enforcement talent").
I think it's about visibility of failure. When a carpenter or office worker make a mistake, it often doesn't take an expert to figure it out (and if it does, it's always a "clerical" error, not an honest mistake in a complex environment). Thus, whenever people look at these jobs, they're not seeing skilled laborers but someone whose time is simply less valuable than theirs. If only they had the time, they could have done it better - whereas programming is mysterious so they need "talent."
> 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?
But, product improvements shouldn't be immeasurable. Through analysis of engagement metrics, talking with users, etc. one can measure improvements. Sure, it isn't a direct measurement, but pure unmeasurable intuition is not how good PMs function
Because Tech is a "profession" and if you think we are you obviously haven't seen how other professions Architects for example and Journalists have a very high opinion of them selves.
...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).
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 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 take home paycheck. At this point, having better mental health and working in a nice company that lets me solve hard software problems is the most important thing, imho.
> I know most people will think this is extremely irrational
I think that's perfectly reasonable. I find it hard to believe it would be "extremely irrational" to most people. Maybe I'm underestimating the extent to which money is fetishized in your culture (I presume the US).
Also, being able to save 2/3 of your net salary is... a ludicrously privileged position, underpaid or not.
I applaud you for finding a way to manage your anxiety, which allows you to live a sustainable and full life. You only get so many years on this earth, so live it however you want!
You are of course free to do this, but you bring up 3 points, let's inspect them.
I'm assuming you're being underpaid by $6k or more a year.
1: Fair, but should you worry about getting fired? Even if you are in danger, if save 2/3 of your paycheck for every month of work you can afford a month of unemployment with no adjustment in lifestyle, that's already large, but you could increase this padding by having a market-conforming salary.
2: Is this worth $500+ a month to you? If so, I'd suggest you seek a therapist, because that is a much healthier long-term way to solve this problem.
3: Well yes... You can also try to not worry about it while earning more.
A nice company, normal hours and a good and interesting job is certainly worth an enormous intangible amount!
However, all things being equal I would not recommend you keep being intentionally underpaid.
I know I am getting underpaid, but I am okay with it. For me, it is the ratio of money and stress that matters. Lets say I get 20% hike but it comes with 50% more stress. I'd say no thanks and be happy with what I got. Better work is welcome, but more stress isn't.
> working in a nice company that lets me solve hard software problems is the most important thing
A thousand times this. Working for a small company it is expected that they won't be able to pay a highly competitive salary, but I have quite a few benefits.
However the most important part by far is being able to work solving software problems. Sometimes when doing explorative work I actually get to implement and (hopefully) reproduce recent scientific papers results. The highly technical work plus the low-pressure enviroment has been great for my mental health.
I even get to leave early the days I have classes, with no reduced pay.
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 million people who know Windows.
TLDR: specialization is more lucrative than sheer hard work and expertise.
I get this same feeling reading the bogleheads.org investment forum. It's mostly comprised of the 1%, and while the investing advice really is wonderful, a lot of the questions asked are to the tune of "Is 3-10 million dollars enough to retire?" and "can I afford a 1 million dollar house making 510K a year?"
The life advice they offer has a different set of (mostly comical) issues. Mostly revolves around various permutations of "I worked 30-40 years at a company and got a pension paying out 10-20x what I contributed. If millennials would just work harder, they too could do that!"
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 order to do something niche that interests you. I did this a long time ago and haven't regretted or reversed it. It returns the feeling of control to you.
3. Check out the country-wide or global statistics. I don't get paid all that much by HN standards, but I'm still in the top decile for my (rich) country.
4. People are very good at cutting cloth to what is available, and at making accommodations with it, so long as they are happy in other ways. I've had friends who get paid ten times what I do, and they are still living on the edge - one financial shock or employment setback and they're in trouble. My situation is no less secure than theirs.
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.
If you're worried apply for another job and tell the hiring manager on the other end what you're expecting for a salary. Don't be ludicrous, but maybe ask for 20% more than you're making. See what they say.
If they don't blink and want you to come in, you're right: you're not making enough.
I've gotten, "Well, we should probably stop this call soon because my cap is X and you're asking for more than that." It was reassuring.
My advice is be to be ludicrous. Ask for far more than you think you're worth. As most people undervalue themselves you'll often find companies saying yes, or at least negotiating down to more than you'd have asked for if you capped your wage raise to 20%.
If they hire you you'll then be faced with the feeling that you're out of your depth, overpaid, and incapable of doing the job you took, but that's a different set of problems.
To add to your anxiety: right now might be the best time to negotiate for life-changing salary in your lifetime.
All the market drivers are in place to make companies compete for senior/principle talent. Your salary is always a symptom of these economic drivers, not your tenure in the field.
Your financial well-being will be defined by negotiating during these goldrushes. Taking a “good” salary during these times could be the biggest mistake of your career.
Never evaluate yourself based on an abstracted metric of a population, without considering inescapable underlying correlated factors in the negative direction. (If all you know is reported salaries from anonymous people, then you don't know how much stress this distribution of people are under, and you don't know what tradeoffs they've had to make that you might not be willing to make, such as enough free time to enjoy the world of literature for instance.)
I get the same weird anxiety reading these threads. I was making 50k base as a post-doc, anxious about ex-academic friends making 80k in the "real world". Then I got a corporate job making ~$120k, and felt anxious that I wasn't making the ~$150k some of my bosses and friends were making. Switched jobs, making ~$200k in a small southern city, and I come into threads like this ("$500k comp at FAANG) feeling anxious that I'm not making enough in my mid-thirties and don't have enough saved up for retirement.
The crazy thing is, going from 50k to 200k, I can't honestly pinpoint whether I'm signficantly happier or not. So I try to not get envy about even the more ridiculous salaries. How does one get off the hamster wheel and feel content enough with salary to just live?
~200k in a small southern city if you adjust for cost of living is about equivalent to $500k at a FAANG in SF/NYC. When you know people who brag about how cheap their $2000 a month tiny studio in an old poorly maintained building in midtown Manhattan you'd understand you have it pretty good making a salary like that in a place you actually have the freedom to move around without running into someone and easily afford a really nice house & property.
Recognize that getting more salary is a fun goal to strive for, that might even get you some more options, but that you’ll be fine forever at your current salary regardless.
I guess I’ve made it one of my goals to strive for more, but If I’d end my career at my current salary that would still be a solid endgame.
"Humans are designed not to be happy, but to pursue happiness -- including wealth and status. Unfortunately, such a pursuit partly promotes unhappiness. Discomfort with our current lot gives us the drive for absolute & relative success -- an evolutionarily useful trait." from a footnote in Anti Ilmanen, _Expected Returns_
If you are making enough to live comfortably and save for the future, you're doing better than the majority of the population, don't worry about the comparisons!
I'm worried and it's given me cause of action to prepare for interviews at companies that I know pay more for SWEs than my current company.
To me, I see rising trends in terms of cost of healthcare, cost of buying a home, schooling for kids, kids themselves, caring for aging parents, etc. I just think "Damn, even with a salary that is way above median for the country, can I realistically reach all my goals in 'due time'?".
Right now I'm not sure if the answer to that question is yes, but I know that when looking at some of the salaries I see around there that grabbing a job at that salary can definitely ease my anxiety.
Preparing for SWE interviews is definitely a rat race, and I may need to move to a high COL area to earn these types of salaries, but it's a trade-off I'm willing to make to help ensure that I can reach the goals I've set for myself.
As a Canadian, I've learned to just not worry. I can't compare myself to the creme del la silicon valley crop, and that's ok. And as a millennial "work until I die" seems very natural as well.
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.
For the lazy: "Median comp package at FB is $240k/yr (this number is skewed low since it's over all employees, not just engineers). Google, Amazon, etc. pay similarly. Combined, these companies employ > 100k programmers in the U.S out of maybe 3M-ish programmers." Directly followed by a screenshot of one of ryandrake's older comments.
FWIW, I don't make $300k, or even $240k (yet) nor work at FAANGM. I also don't live anywhere near the bay area, but that matters less these days (at least if you're in the US). Neither of the numbers are unreasonable targets.
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.
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.
A good sales manager in a busy new car dealership will make 140K a year. A general sales manager is at 165K. A General manager could be over 200K... these folks typically have a HS diploma in their pocket.
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.
"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 first year as well as after six or more years of experience."
So it's not just a matter of PMs being more experienced.
I’m not sure that that disproves the parent. The PMs I know started as PMs several years into their careers, while most of the SWEs I know started out of school. So a year 1 PM might have 1 year of PM experience, but several more years of relevant career experience and salary history that the year 1 SWE doesn’t have.
I wonder how experience is corrected for. Someone who comes in here as a PM usually has previous job experience and an MBA. So someone who has been a PM for a year != SDE for one year.
Yeah, I wondered about that. The PMs with whom I work all have 15+ years experience in the business. And for most of them, "the business" is our specific domain area, not just "software".
I would expect their salaries to be in the same ballpark as a senior engineer or line manager.
Also, the senior PMs all straddle the line between sales, consulting/services, and R&D. They tend to spend a lot of time in the company booth at conferences, dealing with client C-levels one-on-one, and working with our sales to team to ensure R&D is building stuff that will generate revenue. Their day-to-day interaction is with VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE mores than with us plebes.
There shouldn't be any surprise that these are highly compensated positions.
I saw my spouse go through this a few years back. She was a product manager with 13 years of industry experience in a deep but narrow domain (international e-commerce) when she got laid off. The job hunt was kind of arduous, because we live in the midwest and don't want to relocate, and there just aren't that many jobs in her specialty in our area. Eventually she found one, but it took months.
There were plenty of generic product manager jobs in other industries, but they were all wondering why she's worth so much if she doesn't have experience in their industry. Shifting industries, even with the same generic skill set, would have resulted in a 10-20% salary cut.
Compounded by the fact that most companies don't hire PMs until they're more mature (aka more able to pay higher compensations), the methodology is pretty broken.
Agree, I'm a PM at a top software/internet company and engineers with half of my experience make greater package... Amazon is a mixed bag but FB, Linkedin (prior to acuisition), Google, Netflix all skew towards SWEs making higher packages when experience & performance are comparable
One thing I've noticed is that companies generally have fewer PMs than software engineers.
A company might have a whole team of engineers but only one PM, and the PM typically has a title like "Director of Product Management". So it gives the impression that product manager is a director-level position. But eventually as the company grows, they'll eventually hire more PMs who report to the Director of Product Management the same way the software engineers report to the Director of Software Engineering.
I think this has some merit. I’ve seen ratios from 3:1 to 10:1 engineers to PMs at companies I’ve been at. I could imagine the ratio going even higher.
Edit: this does raise the question, though: where do product managers come from? What does the career path of a PM look like, including what happens before they become PMs?
Glass door is slippery. Job titles can be really specific. But obviously it is not the case that a software engineer with 10+ years of experience, in San Francisco, makes $135k.
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 pressure. Myself included.
Now that's my impression. If you like the job, of course I admire that, and welcome you to collect your reward!
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 disappointment that makes everyone only slightly sad. I enjoy the challenge, but it is not for everyone.
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"
Its also basically impossible to avoid office politics as a PM. Suddenly you're in a role where you have to make decisions that come down to opinions. And you know what they say about opinions. You can justify and be as transparent about the process as you possibly can be, but you'll still have people in other parts of the business that have their own assumptions and disagree...and suddenly there's stress and friction in the job.
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 situation better and generally don't see results of initiatives or work you've done until months (or years) later
When people grow and you find opportunities for them, it's incredibly rewarding and amazing. That's one thing I could never have as a programmer on my own.
Turning "off" is hard but I manage my hours so that I get home early enough to make dinner and spend the evening with my son before he's in bed by 8pm. I usually work (or think about work) after that unless I have a planned event.
I'm just spewing now -- I think most of us product managers need therapy sessions to just talk to people. There's just so much .. :)
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.
Middle management here. Can confirm. These are thankless jobs...especially if the product is rocky. Since product is as much art as science everyone thinks they can do it.
Exactly my situation. I need the pay bump to get us to mortgage free in the next three years or so, at which point I hand in my resignation and seek a programmer job again.
Make sure to keep coding in your spare time. I'm trying to get back to dev work now after 5 years in management land, and I'm finding it difficult to get back to my prior level of productivity. Coding skills age pretty quickly.
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: https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Product%20Manager
Thank you for levels.fyi! It's been a handy tool as a hiring manager here trying to translate to our HR department why we should bring people in at level X vs. level Y.
(For those of you reading this who haven't ever been a hiring manager at a bigco, there's a whole negotiation dance we tend to have to do with our internal HR department that you as a candidate don't see. This is why giving us hard data on what your other offers might look like, for example, helps us knock sense into the bean counters. Whee!)
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.
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 $$$.
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.
A good PM, almost by definition is kind of a mini-CEO. Their job is to push the product forward in a way that serves the company’s business interest. Product management is not engineering, design, sales, or marketing, but takes all of those into account.
This is exactly what I've heard for some very senior (L8-10+) folks at Google: if you think of a product development team like a company, the Product Manager (PM) is the CEO, Tech Lead (TL) is CTO. If you have a Program Manager (PgM), they may act as COO.
In fact, when startups are acquired, this is often exactly how their C-suite ends up: CEO -> PM, CTO -> TL, COO -> PgM.
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."
The "wildly differs from company to company" hits home hard. It's like organizational schizophrenia and existential crisis had a child that got named "Product Management".
I'm exactly in the same boat. I love the job when I actually get to do what the ideal product manager job should be. It's very stressful, not very rewarding and it's very unstable work because EVERY fuckup down the chain will just be absorbed by the PM. We're always the first in line to be fired if someone else decided not to do their job (can be Eng, marketing, sales... doesn't matter).
Yea one of the major up/downsides of being the PM is the buck usually stops at you. Priduct couldn’t deliver on its promises? PM is accountable. Product couldn’t sell? PM. Product getting bad press? PM. Product succeeds wildly? PM.
Readit News
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.
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
Deleted Comment
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?
going to conferences -> Because face-to-face contact is far faster and richer than sending emails
researching competitors -> What aren't we doing that others are doing better / what are we doing that's winning / what to change?
researching products -> well, yes, constantly learning
Is it any surprise they tend to make more than people stuck in the office coding?
Listening to customer needs, staying ahead, constantly learning. Sounds like good general career advice.
A paradigm shift is necessary before we end up strangling ourselves.
Deleted Comment
This could make the difference between having to do a complete rewrite at great expense, vs a small tweak.
For startup with no customers it's probably fine to cowboy up a solution, then throw away and start again, to find market fit.
But if you've got lots of customers, and you're forced to rewrite because the previous engineers left an unmaintainable mess, it's going to be hugely complex, risky, long & expensive undertaking.
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?
But, product improvements shouldn't be immeasurable. Through analysis of engagement metrics, talking with users, etc. one can measure improvements. Sure, it isn't a direct measurement, but pure unmeasurable intuition is not how good PMs function
I think that's perfectly reasonable. I find it hard to believe it would be "extremely irrational" to most people. Maybe I'm underestimating the extent to which money is fetishized in your culture (I presume the US).
Also, being able to save 2/3 of your net salary is... a ludicrously privileged position, underpaid or not.
Best of luck to you.
1: Fair, but should you worry about getting fired? Even if you are in danger, if save 2/3 of your paycheck for every month of work you can afford a month of unemployment with no adjustment in lifestyle, that's already large, but you could increase this padding by having a market-conforming salary.
2: Is this worth $500+ a month to you? If so, I'd suggest you seek a therapist, because that is a much healthier long-term way to solve this problem.
3: Well yes... You can also try to not worry about it while earning more.
A nice company, normal hours and a good and interesting job is certainly worth an enormous intangible amount!
However, all things being equal I would not recommend you keep being intentionally underpaid.
A thousand times this. Working for a small company it is expected that they won't be able to pay a highly competitive salary, but I have quite a few benefits.
However the most important part by far is being able to work solving software problems. Sometimes when doing explorative work I actually get to implement and (hopefully) reproduce recent scientific papers results. The highly technical work plus the low-pressure enviroment has been great for my mental health.
I even get to leave early the days I have classes, with no reduced pay.
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 million people who know Windows.
TLDR: specialization is more lucrative than sheer hard work and expertise.
The life advice they offer has a different set of (mostly comical) issues. Mostly revolves around various permutations of "I worked 30-40 years at a company and got a pension paying out 10-20x what I contributed. If millennials would just work harder, they too could do that!"
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 order to do something niche that interests you. I did this a long time ago and haven't regretted or reversed it. It returns the feeling of control to you.
3. Check out the country-wide or global statistics. I don't get paid all that much by HN standards, but I'm still in the top decile for my (rich) country.
4. People are very good at cutting cloth to what is available, and at making accommodations with it, so long as they are happy in other ways. I've had friends who get paid ten times what I do, and they are still living on the edge - one financial shock or employment setback and they're in trouble. My situation is no less secure than theirs.
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.
Beautifully put. I kind of want to frame this, because it captures the brutal honesty of compensation.
If they don't blink and want you to come in, you're right: you're not making enough.
I've gotten, "Well, we should probably stop this call soon because my cap is X and you're asking for more than that." It was reassuring.
If they hire you you'll then be faced with the feeling that you're out of your depth, overpaid, and incapable of doing the job you took, but that's a different set of problems.
All the market drivers are in place to make companies compete for senior/principle talent. Your salary is always a symptom of these economic drivers, not your tenure in the field.
Your financial well-being will be defined by negotiating during these goldrushes. Taking a “good” salary during these times could be the biggest mistake of your career.
Sleep on that!
The crazy thing is, going from 50k to 200k, I can't honestly pinpoint whether I'm signficantly happier or not. So I try to not get envy about even the more ridiculous salaries. How does one get off the hamster wheel and feel content enough with salary to just live?
https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...
I guess I’ve made it one of my goals to strive for more, but If I’d end my career at my current salary that would still be a solid endgame.
To me, I see rising trends in terms of cost of healthcare, cost of buying a home, schooling for kids, kids themselves, caring for aging parents, etc. I just think "Damn, even with a salary that is way above median for the country, can I realistically reach all my goals in 'due time'?".
Right now I'm not sure if the answer to that question is yes, but I know that when looking at some of the salaries I see around there that grabbing a job at that salary can definitely ease my anxiety.
Preparing for SWE interviews is definitely a rat race, and I may need to move to a high COL area to earn these types of salaries, but it's a trade-off I'm willing to make to help ensure that I can reach the goals I've set for myself.
The whole cultural bias against talking about how much money one makes has to go away - it serves no one except the people writing checks.
For the lazy: "Median comp package at FB is $240k/yr (this number is skewed low since it's over all employees, not just engineers). Google, Amazon, etc. pay similarly. Combined, these companies employ > 100k programmers in the U.S out of maybe 3M-ish programmers." Directly followed by a screenshot of one of ryandrake's older comments.
FWIW, I don't make $300k, or even $240k (yet) nor work at FAANGM. I also don't live anywhere near the bay area, but that matters less these days (at least if you're in the US). Neither of the numbers are unreasonable targets.
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.
"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 first year as well as after six or more years of experience."
So it's not just a matter of PMs being more experienced.
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.
I would expect their salaries to be in the same ballpark as a senior engineer or line manager.
There shouldn't be any surprise that these are highly compensated positions.
There were plenty of generic product manager jobs in other industries, but they were all wondering why she's worth so much if she doesn't have experience in their industry. Shifting industries, even with the same generic skill set, would have resulted in a 10-20% salary cut.
Compounded by the fact that most companies don't hire PMs until they're more mature (aka more able to pay higher compensations), the methodology is pretty broken.
A company might have a whole team of engineers but only one PM, and the PM typically has a title like "Director of Product Management". So it gives the impression that product manager is a director-level position. But eventually as the company grows, they'll eventually hire more PMs who report to the Director of Product Management the same way the software engineers report to the Director of Software Engineering.
Edit: this does raise the question, though: where do product managers come from? What does the career path of a PM look like, including what happens before they become PMs?
According to sallaries on glass door, in sanfrancisco with 10-14 years exp: Product Manager: 145k$ Web Developer: 110k$ Software Engineer: 135k$
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.
Now that's my impression. If you like the job, of course I admire that, and welcome you to collect your reward!
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"
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 situation better and generally don't see results of initiatives or work you've done until months (or years) later
When people grow and you find opportunities for them, it's incredibly rewarding and amazing. That's one thing I could never have as a programmer on my own.
Turning "off" is hard but I manage my hours so that I get home early enough to make dinner and spend the evening with my son before he's in bed by 8pm. I usually work (or think about work) after that unless I have a planned event.
I'm just spewing now -- I think most of us product managers need therapy sessions to just talk to people. There's just so much .. :)
(For those of you reading this who haven't ever been a hiring manager at a bigco, there's a whole negotiation dance we tend to have to do with our internal HR department that you as a candidate don't see. This is why giving us hard data on what your other offers might look like, for example, helps us knock sense into the bean counters. Whee!)
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 $$$.
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.
Maybe you’ve never worked with a good PM?
In fact, when startups are acquired, this is often exactly how their C-suite ends up: CEO -> PM, CTO -> TL, COO -> PgM.
This is a seniority thing not a "this function is more valuable" thing.