hey, I’m currently a CS student. has anyone sudied CS and ended up in PM? what is the path for a PM? (career progression) would this experience help one in running a company later in life? what is the TC compared to, say, SWE? are PMs looked down upon by engineers? i am good at computer science and programming, but don’t have much professional experience. i happen to have plenty of project management, leadership experience compared to others my age. could really use some advice UPDATE: the reason for this post is Google sending me an interview invite for a PM role i randomly applied for. i’ve applied to SW positions in the past and never got an inverview
Yes I went from CS to PM and regretted it.
What was the main reason for regretting it?
Would like to know too
People , who are technical and grow into managing projects and products do a much better job and have a better chance of career progression. My 2 cents .
I didn’t study CS but learned and did web based front end programming back in the early 2000s, then did release engineering and transitioned to product management. Pay wise SWEs are almost always a higher band at most companies. Exception is maybe Facebook but then pay scale in the last few years have shifted towards the core technical roles. PMs are a thankless bunch. As a pm I deal with all the administrative headaches and the team will always get the credit whether they deserve it or not. When shit hits the fan the PM gets all the blame. In retrospect I wish I continue to develop deeper front end coding skills and then start picking up backend to become full stack than wasting me time on other roles that now pay less. Don’t do it unless you really don’t want to code
I was a developer that became a PM, you don't get looked down on so to speak, but devs, engineers, dbas, etc are all very wary of you at first because most have had bad experiences with PMs. This is mostly because there aren't enough technical PMs, most come from a business background and don't take the time to learn anything about how coding or migrations or deployments actually work. So you do, initially, deal with difficulty until you prove yourself to your team. From my experience, 6 years as a PM now, if you work hard for your team, get to know them, go to bat for them agaisnt ridiculous requests, timelines, etc you'll earn their respect. More importantly you'll need to know how to politely tell people internally (sales, management, etc.) and externally ( customers, VP level personnel) that their request may or may not work, why it might not and provide a solid solution. Remember, most people only think they know what they want, question is can you be persuasive enough to show them what they are really looking for?
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