I don't think that Product Manager is exclusively a trophy job, if at all. It takes quite some skill to manage a product properly, maintain healthy product boundaries, create a sensible roadmap, combat feature creep, etc.
A product manager's skill set can make or break a product.
The author acknowledges this, that a given job is a trophy job for some and not others. PM becomes a trophy job when it exists only to tick a box on your tech climber CV. Many people do it because they are actually interested in building a product. Same with "founder" / owner. VC I'm not sure about.
Oh, you’d be surprised how much damage a janitor can do (me remembering the time the cleaning guy at my dad’s lab accidentally tipped over a whole shelf of mice)
I think PMs get a bad rap mostly because it can be less obvious when someone is bad.
If you're a bad programmer and produce nothing, it'll (usually) quickly be discovered (though not always) even if you're good at talking. It's also easy to spot check in the interview before you hire them.
If you're a bad PM, but good at talking - it's easier to pass the interview and it can be harder to know they're bad and fire them.
Great PMs support their teams and make things better for the engineers they work with (especially by avoiding people working on stuff that doesn't matter). Bad ones make their teams miserable and add negative value. The role can also vary depending on the company (sometimes it includes product design work and sometimes it doesn't).
The best PMs I know are also really good at debugging/troubleshooting and have a technical background (I think necessary to be really great).
A bad PM that's good at talking will usually lead to a non-consistent product strategy (due to promising too much to different stakeholders), and subsequently to death march projects to fulfill all the non realistic promises made.
If you're long enough in the tech industry you've seen such people and learned to identify them with good certainty after one or two meetings.
I agree - as a Product Manager in my third role it is not all that easy and can be in some companies really frustrating.
I would say a great data scientist/ head of data science with the freedom to operate would be even more of trophy job in my view.
Those are two completely different skill sets. One focuses on the product and one focuses on the data. Unless, the data IS the product, but that's sort of rare, isn't it?
Huh, in my circles the real trophy jobs are quant roles at top firms. And given the caliber of the people there - and the compensation - they're arguably not trophy roles. Tbh ppl going for the pm/vc path are seen mostly as tools.
I'm happy to agree that some recruiters provide value, but on average? I don't know how to objectively tell, but it sure seems like spray-and-pray is still the most common approach, and that doesn't seem valuable.
I view recruiters the same way as product managers. Most are terrible and cause more headaches than they solve, but a good one is worth their weight in gold.
Full disclosure - I am a mediocre product manager. First PM role after 20 years in engineering.
My company is kind of unique and I just urge you to throughly research the company, culture, and situation. I'm a hybrid product/engineering manager, while everyone else is strictly product manager with engineering counterparts.
Long story short, this company is in the middle of being cleaned up by private equity. It used to be a cost center, and has never made money in its history. In my opinion, engineers were allowed to do whatever they wanted with no oversight. There were some god-awful, appalling business and engineering practices here.
Honestly, I didn't really absorb all the red flags. I was more enamored with the idea of a career change and trying something different. I think I was particularly targeted for the role because I was previously an engineering manager. My product is universally hated and had been left for dead. I've had to milk everything I can from one real engineer and several data/business analysts to get it resurrected. Part of that is mentoring the DA/BAs how to do basic git branches and commits while butting heads with the engineer to get him to stop doing psychotic things. Just this morning we got into it because I stopped allowing direct pushes to master.
Honestly, this situation is such depressing, pain in the ass, but the moments where I get to be a real PM has been pretty fun. Just listening to customers and relaying what we're doing different has been rewarding.
Why still? In-house corporate recruiters working at Big tech are not making the Lions share of money available in that field. Good recruiters work on commission and not fixed salary.
You make it sound like they're obsolete. The number of applicants per role has increased dramatically since the pandemic. A recruiter who can sift through thousands of those applicants and accurately identify who's worth talking to and who's a ChatGPT bot is worth their weight in gold.
That definition of "trophy job" is one that I can agree with. However, I can't think of any tech job that I'd consider a "trophy job" by that definition. Am I weird?
The issue I had with that article is that things like prestige and being mixed in with comp in the context of status. They probably correlate to some degree but, if If I personally enjoy a job and I'm very well-compensated for it, I actually don't care that much if my friends go "OOOH. You're a $X at $Y." (Though I may care--as the article does touch on to some degree--if the prestige makes it a better springboard to other opportunities.)
different for different people I imagine. I can see "software architect" being one thats dying out these days. Another would be some form of researcher.
I was a Product Manager in the 90s, a VC in the early 00s, and a founder in the 10s. Fave job was probably my 90s stint as 1st PM doing the launch and growth stage to IPO, but then the outcome was favourable, so perhaps it was that rather than the precise nature of the work.
I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. If having a job on my resume will help me increase the amount of money I can trade for my labor in the future, I consider that high status.
I think these roles only hire from top tier colleges and if you didn't get into one, too bad the ship has sailed. Can't argue on comp though. These jobs post very well.
I work at one of these funds in the UK. The majority of our quants -- and, indeed, our front office engineers working on the trading stack -- are Oxbridge grads.
If you want to be a quant, getting a post-graduate education at a top-tier university is pretty much a requirement. If you want to be a software engineer/SRE/etc. in the front office, you might be able to find your way in by going to the tech industry proper and then pivoting.
Also, you underestimate how difficult it is to get technical people to talk about tech to multiple audiences, including non-tech people.
Also also, many of the good devrel folks in the industry _do_ have code in production; they just wanted something different than doing engineering day in day out. (Think of the person doing devrel at Tailscale, for example; they are very technical).
It's not a trophy job; it's just more extroverted and people-facing.
CTO / VP of engineering at small VC-backed companies that employ less than 50 engineers. My current CTO spends most of his time spamming ChatGPT-related stuff, and discussing "key objectives" he replaces every few months, thus having next to no accountability. It was the same at my previous job.
Oh lord, I ended up working at a place that had one of those. He would always carry this huge stack of old-school fan folded green and white dot matrix printer paper to prove his bona fides and would spend every meeting furiously scribbling circles and boxes on it and then throwing it away after. His catch phrase (in like 2013) was “I could probably whip together an AI solution for this but I’m too busy, you guys just let me know when you have some regular solution for me to review.”
The quality of talent at VC backed businesses could actually be quite abyssmal. I have even companies where directors of entire orgs never worked as an engineer and it's laughable how little some of these people actually know about the field.
Its not even that. Look at the job description for any managerial position in programming and they almost never ask for programming experience.
Imagine two cvs. One has 10 years of experience programming and 2 "managing" a team of software devs. The other 10 years of experience "managing" and knows nothing about programming. Guess who they would hire?
This is because the system is top down. More often than not top directors are old and understand nothing about technology. So they see engineers as threatening and scary and they prefer to hire people they "understand".
Most people managing a software developer team can't read code so everything eventually becomes super political because the manager is guided by impressions and things like the name of the PR ans such.
Its like hiring a blind man to supervise a group of painters. Then managers feel super insecure because they don't understand things very well even if they try with metaphors. Insecure managers tend to be very aggressive and toxic
I guess to an extent it’s not about what the best version of the role is but what the role becomes when lots of people chase it for status. So the best PMs might be very substantive, but are there many people chasing it for status? Yes.
> Ask any recent college graduate and they’ll tell you the most coveted jobs in each field and across all of them. They’ll also tell you how competitive it is to get one. These tend to be common targets for trophy jobs.
This really gets at the heart of my reaction to this article - this feels like a description of how people who have no real idea of what life is like in an industry think people feel might feel about well-known titles within it. I'm not seeing much connection between this article and the reality of working in tech.
A very well known tech company I briefly contracted for employs a Futurist. I’d put a negative sign on his substance rating. Not only is it a bullshit job, he has a segment in the all-hands meetings, taking a slice out of everyone’s fortnight with his drivel.
however much this guy is hustling out of the company, i guarantee you it's cheaper than hiring strategy consultants from the B4 who will tell you the same thing, but at 900/hr.
My trophy job is where I get paid well, don't deal with idiotic janitorial work being forced upon me by upper management who have no idea what they're doing, and don't have to work off hours very often.
This is a good post however the author computes a ratio of two quantities without defining how they are measured. But the decision boundary seems spot on.
Tech Evangelist strikes me as a job where you need to know someone in order to get it. There are too many programmers who would love to talk all day, every day about their favorite language or tool and why it's awesome.
80 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadA product manager's skill set can make or break a product.
If you're a bad programmer and produce nothing, it'll (usually) quickly be discovered (though not always) even if you're good at talking. It's also easy to spot check in the interview before you hire them.
If you're a bad PM, but good at talking - it's easier to pass the interview and it can be harder to know they're bad and fire them.
Great PMs support their teams and make things better for the engineers they work with (especially by avoiding people working on stuff that doesn't matter). Bad ones make their teams miserable and add negative value. The role can also vary depending on the company (sometimes it includes product design work and sometimes it doesn't).
The best PMs I know are also really good at debugging/troubleshooting and have a technical background (I think necessary to be really great).
If you're long enough in the tech industry you've seen such people and learned to identify them with good certainty after one or two meetings.
Full disclosure - I am a mediocre product manager. First PM role after 20 years in engineering.
Long story short, this company is in the middle of being cleaned up by private equity. It used to be a cost center, and has never made money in its history. In my opinion, engineers were allowed to do whatever they wanted with no oversight. There were some god-awful, appalling business and engineering practices here.
Honestly, I didn't really absorb all the red flags. I was more enamored with the idea of a career change and trying something different. I think I was particularly targeted for the role because I was previously an engineering manager. My product is universally hated and had been left for dead. I've had to milk everything I can from one real engineer and several data/business analysts to get it resurrected. Part of that is mentoring the DA/BAs how to do basic git branches and commits while butting heads with the engineer to get him to stop doing psychotic things. Just this morning we got into it because I stopped allowing direct pushes to master.
Honestly, this situation is such depressing, pain in the ass, but the moments where I get to be a real PM has been pretty fun. Just listening to customers and relaying what we're doing different has been rewarding.
- Minimal actual work
- “Lavish” lifestyle: lots of travel and networking
- Fairly influential in the industry
- Can get paid $10-50K/year for attending a few meetings per year, per company board
There’s a lot of substance in those jobs (denominator), but the status is insanely high (numerator).
Smart. Quants are generally “smart” with diverse software, hardware, and math knowledge.
Scarcity. In the United States, the entire industry might hire 1,000 to 2,000 new grad quants per year.
And most importantly, a realistic path to $1M+ TC by 5 YOE, and $10M+ TC is not uncommon for 15-20 YOE.
That’s wild, if true.
If you want to be a quant, getting a post-graduate education at a top-tier university is pretty much a requirement. If you want to be a software engineer/SRE/etc. in the front office, you might be able to find your way in by going to the tech industry proper and then pivoting.
Also, you underestimate how difficult it is to get technical people to talk about tech to multiple audiences, including non-tech people.
Also also, many of the good devrel folks in the industry _do_ have code in production; they just wanted something different than doing engineering day in day out. (Think of the person doing devrel at Tailscale, for example; they are very technical).
It's not a trophy job; it's just more extroverted and people-facing.
My mom just got rid of 2 unopened cases of the stuff sitting in her basement from the late 80s.
Imagine two cvs. One has 10 years of experience programming and 2 "managing" a team of software devs. The other 10 years of experience "managing" and knows nothing about programming. Guess who they would hire?
This is because the system is top down. More often than not top directors are old and understand nothing about technology. So they see engineers as threatening and scary and they prefer to hire people they "understand".
Most people managing a software developer team can't read code so everything eventually becomes super political because the manager is guided by impressions and things like the name of the PR ans such.
Its like hiring a blind man to supervise a group of painters. Then managers feel super insecure because they don't understand things very well even if they try with metaphors. Insecure managers tend to be very aggressive and toxic
This is such a sad industry.
This really gets at the heart of my reaction to this article - this feels like a description of how people who have no real idea of what life is like in an industry think people feel might feel about well-known titles within it. I'm not seeing much connection between this article and the reality of working in tech.
I mean if someone said they were a Quant or PM that seems a bit meh to me, but if they were a Linux Kernel "lieutenant", I'd be impressed.
One where I earn enough to retire early and own all my own time.
Seriously? Trophy Jobs now? Take a step back and think how absurd that is.