>>>> It's also just a case where lots more people are qualified for this kind of job so it's not as hard to fill a position when the need arrises.>>>>

Interesting. I think it's the opposite. Because PM culture differs from company to company, I feel like companies interview for PMs with a bias for how they expect their PMs to behave. This would be unlike Developers where companies are looking for folks proficient in specific languages.

I've had friends who interviewed with companies for PM positions and the focus was on their doing great UI mockups. The interviewer was looking for good UIs. Unfortunately, these folks were coming from places where the UI mockup they did was just basic placement of elements to communicate the elements they expected their solutions to use. A seperate design team would later turn their mockups into beautiful UIs

That's fair, I do acknowledge that the PM role varies greatly between companies (and often within companies). For example at my company PMs would never make a UI mockup, they would basically be the bridge between designers, management, customers, and engineers when it comes to UI. But if you aren't requiring your PMs to be technical, I mean the sheer amount of people qualified to do that job (even with stipulations such as "knows design") is a lot greater than the set of people who are qualified engineers.

But I also think it's ignorant to say that companies just want folks proficient in specific languages. That might be true for people without much experience but in most cases beyond that (which pay well) people are looking for deep technical understanding of a specific technology (e.g. deep learning) or a specific problem (e.g. scaling large web services).

>>>> But I also think it's ignorant to say that companies just want folks proficient in specific languages. >>>.

Fair Point. For experienced hires, companies want technical knowledge of a technology/domain

>>>> But if you aren't requiring your PMs to be technical, I mean the sheer amount of people qualified to do that job (even with stipulations such as "knows design")>>>

Well, for experienced hires too, domain specific knowledge is also relevant for PMs.

In full agreement. The expectations of a product manager from one company to the next are wildly different. Far different than any other role that I can think of in fact.

Because I see this sentiment (PMs have easy jobs and don't really do anything) a lot on HN, I want to offer an anecdotal counterpoint: I am a PM in San Francisco and most of the PMs I know personally work extremely hard and add a good deal of value to their companies. I realize that as a PM I am biased towards thinking I provide value/work hard, but I can safely say I have never heard of anyone working in a PM role as easy/useless as the one you describe.

As a small team's CTO doing both product management and engineering, I'd say product management is the more difficult role. Might be because I'm not as experienced, but despite having a natural aptitude for it and even after having gone through training and spent a lot of time doing it, I find the job damn hard. You're the broker for a lot of unstructured information and have to fend off all kinds of disruptive influences to land even close to where you're trying to go. I have immense respect for product leaders at innovative organizations.

I don't think all PMs have easy jobs or are useless, and I even know PMs who I think have kind of easy/unimportant jobs (not that I would ever tell them that about their job) who still take a lot of pride in their work and do work hard anyway. But I do think there are lots of PMs out there who essentially fill the role of "business analyst" who end up doing low-skill things that fall outside of easily-defined role-buckets. That's not the employee's fault so much as the organization's.

That sentiment comes from the culture of shitting on everyone other than managers, when anyone is capable of working hard or not.

Seconding this. It's also worth noting that the salary ceiling for PMs is often higher than for developers.