In Silicon Valley, software engineering is synonymous with eye-watering repayment. Monthly salaries for engineering interns (approximately $ eighty-one, six hundred per year annualized) are approximately two times the median salary in the relaxation of the u. S . At the same time as the fact of excessive-paying coding jobs is not wrong, programming isn’t the simplest manner to climb Silicon Valley’s career ladder, and it’s in reality not the most lucrative.
Online hiring platform Hired launched a record on Aug. 25 studying 31,146 interview requests from 1,848 organizations made through Employed’s platform at some stage in the first half of 2016. Their findings display product managers consistently get the top salary offers, $133,000 on common. Software program engineers have been offered a mean of $123,000 followed by designers at $ hundred and fifteen,000 throughout the second quarter of 2016. Analyses of H1B painting visas and Glassdoor facts from Google, Fb, and other tech giants arrive at similar conclusions.
The income gain for product managers has the handiest grown, says Employed’s information scientist Jessica Kirkpatrick. “We see that software program engineers have always been paid much less than product managers, but that the pay gap has widened over the last year,” she wrote by using e-mail. The fashion holds after accounting for enjoyment. Software program engineers, in common, are paid about 10% less than product managers for their first 12 months in addition to after six or more years of enjoyment.
Product control skills are coveted, argues Ken Norton, a former Google product supervisor and accomplice at GV, Google’s challenge arm, because “ultimately extremely good product management normally makes the difference between triumphing and dropping.” Product managers ought to shepherd a product from idea to completion by setting imaginative and prescient, information for customers, imposing timelines, managing groups, and retaining a watch on the business model.
At the same time as software program engineers enter product control roles, a pc technology education isn’t required. It’s now not even the most essential talent, says Hunter Walk, former director of product management at Google and the co-founding father of the venture fund Homebrew. “The high-quality product managers own a wide set of abilities which allow them to somehow manipulate wearing those multiple hats,” he writes. Stroll himself holds a bachelor’s diploma in history and an MBA.
The best role that tops product managers’ salaries–and handiest briefly in 2015–turned into an information scientist, says Hired. That anomaly is not going to crop up quickly, says Kirkpatrick. Interview requests for facts technology applicants grew with the aid of 20% throughout the beyond area, the most of any role, however, the variety of statistics technology applicants on Hired grew using 50%. That oversupply is probable to force down salaries.