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 first year as well as after six or more years of experience."

So it's not just a matter of PMs being more experienced.

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.

That's a fair point. I make less as a PM than I did when I was an Engineer, but I had 13 years of engineering experience before I transitioned. All of the new PMs I've worked with have a minimum of 5 years of experience in some other related role and most have a related degree.

I was a PM straight out of college and know many PMs straight out college. Both at the big companies like Google and smaller companies.

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.

Well, it's the challenge of finding one person who can talk sales/marketing language to executives as easily as they can talk with their technical teams all while being highly organized and capable of managing a team.

They don't need to be masters at any one of those things (aside from organization and management), but they need to be well above average at all of them, which is rare nexus of talents to find.

Also, experience and skills like that are usually earned through entry-level work in other fields. Most of the good PMs I work with came up through other career paths (like non-profits, academia, print or tv production, paralegals, etc.) that are typically not so well compensated. They make lateral moves into product management for financial reasons, and they top out quickly. The highest paid PMs I know were mostly just former engineers themselves.

Also worth mentioning that product managers make great startup founders (particularly with a a great engineer co-founder).

Sales, product development, customer and market research, internal management, marketing - these are all critical skills for startups. People leaving to start their own businesses would shrink the pool, and put upwards pressure on wages.

I've also seen a lot of PM job ads asking for people with startup experience.

If anything, I'm surprised the salaries aren't higher than what's reported in the article.

$133,000 is baller money anyplace but SV and the other high-cost cities. Also, the article is discussing salaries - I can't say for sure, but I'd bet PMs frequently have significant bonus eligibility, so that $133k could easily be $150k+ in actual annual income.

And the numbers in the article appear to be national, not limited to SV (despite the headline)...

"...31,146 interview requests from 1,848 companies made through Hired’s platform..."

"...Analyses of H1B work visas and Glassdoor data from Google, Facebook..."

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.

OT (and pretty random, apologies in advance!) but my company is distributed and might be a good fit for your spouse (we're an international e-commerce marketplace) if interested at all or if she'd like to chat, feel free to hit me up (email in profile!), thanks!

I'll ask her about it. Thanks!

This.

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?

(was a product manager, now a project manager but could move back to my old role pretty easily)

I came over to the dark side from software development. Was tired of implementing other people’s bad ideas and convinced product leadership at my company that I could be an idea guy myself (along with all the other footwork and juggling you need to do as a PM). So it was an internal transfer. I think the good PMs have strong hands-on “actual development” backgrounds. I realize this is a self-serving opinion, too.

What made you then decide to switch to project management?

An opportunity came up and I thought I’d try it. The jury is still out but I think the role fits me better—project management seems to be more execution oriented than creative idea-generating. I’m also a big believer of being a generalist, so any opportunity to wear a new hat is welcome!

1) Straight from Business Schools - Folks who go into technology tend to become PMs after their MBAs

2) Internal transfers - Software Engineers switch to PM

3) Management/Technology Consultant -> PM: Folks switch from consulting (where they are implementing products designed by vendors) to becoming PMs in the vendor companies.

The internal transfers is much broader than just SWE to PM, as well. UX designers, technical writers, QA testers, etc. Anyone working on a dev team might start picking up PM responsibilities and make that transition at some point.

It totally depends on what problems you’re trying to solve. Engineering managers often end up performing many duties of a PM, and in smaller companies the only PMs you may need are the founders/executives

Most PMs I know are former software engineers (or if hired as PMs out of school, studied computer science) with good people skills and high level knowledge of what they help coordinate. I would hate to work with an MBA-type PM who couldn’t appreciate technical problems and solutions

Hence, you look at distributions - not averages.

Exactly. An engineer with 10 years experience, will usually be an EM who probably earns more or equal to a PM

it doesn't mean it, but there is evidence to it being true.

According to sallaries on glass door, in sanfrancisco with 10-14 years exp: Product Manager: 145k$ Web Developer: 110k$ Software Engineer: 135k$

135k is almost what many new grad software engineers make now, before considering stock. those numbers look very wrong

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.

Indeed PMs are actually generally undercompensated relative to their importance to a company.