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!