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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

In my view, they can have it. I was a project manager (granted, a slightly different title and role) for a couple years. I went back to the bench. Fortunately I took a pay hike in both directions.

Those middle management jobs seem to be super high stress, long hours, and low reward. Literally everybody I've known who went into one of those jobs did so upon the birth of their first kid, when they felt the financial pressure. Myself included.

Now that's my impression. If you like the job, of course I admire that, and welcome you to collect your reward!

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It is a job where your goal is to try disappoint people most slowly. You are pretty much rigged to disappoint everyone. Gotta spread that around though. Marketing, sales, and the business end all have expectation of perfect execution, on-time delivery, bug free, and the development, testing, support teams all just want realistic requirements and timelines. Somewhere in the middle is the island of slight disappointment that makes everyone only slightly sad. I enjoy the challenge, but it is not for everyone.

This was very well put. And one of the hardest topics to navigate in an interview process: "how would you handle a case when peron X is failing to meet requirement Y or delivery date Z?

I freaking hate this question as there is no magic answer aside from "whatever it takes to minimize the overall negative impact of the outcome for the company/project/product"

That's a lot like asking "how would you turn water into wine?" Manage expectations and deal with angry people (aside from, in your example, mitigating those failures in the future).

That’s the joke

Its also basically impossible to avoid office politics as a PM. Suddenly you're in a role where you have to make decisions that come down to opinions. And you know what they say about opinions. You can justify and be as transparent about the process as you possibly can be, but you'll still have people in other parts of the business that have their own assumptions and disagree...and suddenly there's stress and friction in the job.

Middle management -- this hits home hard.

Switched to People Manager / Product Manager / Many Other Hats role around the birth of my child.

I find it quite rewarding, but yes, endless hours and high stress. It's also an adjustment from programmer life when you had very short feedback loops, but now as a manager no one ever tells you "Hey, you're doing a good/bad job here!" and instead, you have to just read every situation better and generally don't see results of initiatives or work you've done until months (or years) later

When people grow and you find opportunities for them, it's incredibly rewarding and amazing. That's one thing I could never have as a programmer on my own.

Turning "off" is hard but I manage my hours so that I get home early enough to make dinner and spend the evening with my son before he's in bed by 8pm. I usually work (or think about work) after that unless I have a planned event.

I'm just spewing now -- I think most of us product managers need therapy sessions to just talk to people. There's just so much .. :)

I'm just impressed you got your son in bed by 8pm...

Haha! He's still a toddler so maybe that's why ;) We've been lucky with his routine since early on.

I'm honestly confused why you work that much. Are you getting a lot of company stock? Whatever your % increase in salary was cannot be realistically worth the extra time and mental effort you are spending.

My single comment doesn't pain a whole picture. I work a lot but not to the point of burnout.

I don't know. I love the product we've built and I find challenge through iterating on the big ideas. Sometimes I like to go back in the code and improve non critical things. Maybe I'm just a workaholic?

Middle management here. Can confirm. These are thankless jobs...especially if the product is rocky. Since product is as much art as science everyone thinks they can do it.

Project manager and product manager are not the same thing.

Which they acknowledged

They are more than "slightly" different. A product manger is a creative professional. A project manager is an administrative professional.

Not really. When I had a "product manager" title, I had to do plenty of "project management".

It’s almost as if the roles are a little bit different at each different company! I’ve worked places with a single person doing these roles, and places where they were separate people. Also worked places without someone doing them, and that situation is consistently awful.

I've found there's some status thing with 'product manager' (particularly at Google) and product managers will make sure you know the difference.

In practice I'm not sure how different they actually are. Typically when someone is desperate to say how much better/harder their title difference is it's because it's not really obvious otherwise.

At my workplace, the product managers are part of the marketing department, and interface with the sales force. Most of them have MBA's.

The project managers are in the engineering department and interface with the engineers, suppliers, operations, etc. Most have engineering degrees.

They work out most of the project documentation together, such as the specifications, budget, schedule, etc.

Creative writing, maybe? Outside of founder-level product managers, of which I have worked with several who are actually creative, I remain unconvinced there is much real difference.

Product Managers - identify problems to be solved, decide/play a role into what features goes into MVP or a release, talks to customers, comes up with/designs the solutions (functional solutions) to the problems (aka features and how they interconnect), do UI designs (major UI designs can go to the UX team, smaller UI designs stay with product manager), etc

If your company is using the sprint model, the Product manager is not doing much of project management.

At the end of the day, what a PM does depends on the company and how they use PMs

So you say. However, I've been at companies where PMs are running the daily sprint / scrum meetings.

As a product manager (technically "program manager" at Microsoft, but it's roughly the same as product managers across the industry), project management is one of the many things I do, in addition to the list above. But I am explicitly not a project manager in that I'm supposed to minimize time spent on that and share some responsibilities in that space with my engineering counterparts.

I don't think I've ever worked someplace where the product manager role is fundamentally creative. It's their job to j understand stakeholder concerns and coordinate the team around solutions. But designers are typically doing the creative UX work.

Exactly my situation. I need the pay bump to get us to mortgage free in the next three years or so, at which point I hand in my resignation and seek a programmer job again.

Make sure to keep coding in your spare time. I'm trying to get back to dev work now after 5 years in management land, and I'm finding it difficult to get back to my prior level of productivity. Coding skills age pretty quickly.

I have refused to go into management precisely to avoid what you are experiencing. My wages have somewhat stagnated because of this, and most of my working acquaintances have moved up, but they are miserable in comparison.

Yes, they make more, in some cases much more, but after being in IT for over 20 years, I desire my "8-4 M-F no work nights/no work weekends" life more than I do a little extra coin. I go home and do zero work save things for the wife and kids, which are more akin to fun projects. I have told my boss more than once that I have a union mentality towards work. I work only during working hours. I demand a life/work balance and would happily leave should this become otherwise. I tell young IT people all the time to not allow themselves to be burned out. Work your day job and go home to your girlfriend/wife and enjoy your down time. When I'm home, I don't do any IT work other than tinker with Raspberry Pis or projects with my kids.

You cannot hit the rewind button if you have a family. Your family will not remember you for your long work schedule (hell, they may not even remember you), rather you will be remembered for the quality time. I have told myself that I want my kids to remember our time together as one big, fun on-going series of projects where we learn things together and have fun doing it.

To each is own, for sure. I have the exact opposite philosophy. I would rather my kids see me as someone who is trying to achieve something big. After a while, they have their own interests and don’t want to do projects with you anyway.

Fair comment. By projects, that is not limited to strictly IT. My kids may not choose IT as a career, but they will certainly understand how to do basic coding, build a computer, understand the inner working, etc., for if nothing else, they understand cause and effect and that they are capable of being makers should they choose.

I take my kids fishing and hunting, for example, things they thoroughly enjoy. We go to the cinema, bookstore to get hands on reading time, they have learned how to budget for groceries, gas, fun money, etc. I could do none of this were I chained to my desk at work pounding out code in Visual Studio.

How old are your kids? A word of advice: your kids will never be impressed by what you do, to them you could be POTUS and it would just be the normal set point for them. What they will remember is whether you cared more about your work than you did them.

Completely disagree. Kids need attention from their parents but a lot less that you might think. Best way to raise them is by example. Sure, if you never spend time with them that’s bad, but you don’t need to spend 5 hours every night with them either.

You're putting words in my mouth, I was talking about showing interest, you're talking about "5 hours a night". I repeat the question: how old are your kids?

You are only as safe as your boss permits you. Tomorrow he may leave/get fired/die; the person replacing him may not be as tolerant of your actions.

Be that as may be, I have a right to a life/work balance. My own father worked himself into an early grave at 60. I lived with his being chained to his job. I swore I would never do it.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm warning you of some of the possible weaknesses in your argument that you're in a protected, safe place. And I do this only because I've made the same assumptions a couple of times and paid the price for not figuring it out sooner.

Ha, have a newborn and have just recently considered making the move into product.

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