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Comment by bousaid | Hacker News Reader

While I was at Microsoft this summer I learned that the PM position has become highly sought after by MBAs from schools like Duke etc.

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Probably because the salary is comparable to dev, but with potentially a fraction of the work.

I still don't fully understand the PM role here at MSFT. At previous companies I was at, the nearest equivalent of a PM was involved closely with engineering to organize projects, discuss features, etc. Here, they're just in meetings all day and emailing each other rhetorical questions. Having attended many of those meetings, the value-add seems trivial to me.

Maybe their job is actually really demanding and I'm just way off the mark though. It also likely varies from team to team.

I don't know what you count as "work" but the PMs I know are all way too plugged-in to email, work longer hours, and stress out more than engineers. I think it's harder for them to prove their value via concrete deliverables and so they compensate by excessive enthusiasm.

I think it would help if we understood what kinds of things they're accomplishing through email, meetings, etc.

I think the 'way too plugged-in to email' is what bugs me. I'm the recipient of _hundreds_ of PM emails a day. As an engineer it's easy to see this as lots of talking and little doing. But you're right, it's probably a result of not being able to have more tangible results.

Yeah, you get to be someone's boss (as in telling them what to do) without all the icky parts of actually being a manager. The structure of tech companies now is so bonkers, the person who tells you what to do isn't your manager, and your manager is really just there for, I dunno, moral support and to give you a performance review every 6 months even though they don't actually work with you.

Maybe a lot of them just want to live out some sort of Steve Jobs fantasy

Spolsky was a PM at MS, I don't think Jobs ever was.

I didn't mean it that literally. Just in general, I can imagine a bunch of people buying into some sort of faux-enlightenment aesthetic and parading around as product gurus.

I've been in the industry 20+ years and I still have no idea what a product manager actually does. As far as I can tell everyone completely ignores them. Maybe their job is just to be a warm body filling a chair in pointless meetings, so programmers can do real work? Seems perfect for an MBA when the weather's too bad to play golf.

Or maybe they want to participate in the tech industry?

Programmers don't have a monopoly on being interested in technology, nor do they have a monopoly on positive contributions in it either.

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