[thriveaway]

Thanks for the long reply!

How much do your PMs work on average than? I find there is always something to improve and to work on. I can't see where I could find a reasonable line to draw on what gets done and what not. Or is the role of the PM narrow enough that the teams throughput is the bottleneck?

Your answer actually presses on a core motive for why I want to go part-time. Bluntly said: I'm mostly in it for the money and just enough to comfortably get by (I'm still enthusiastic about any arising challenges and I think I'm seen as a motivated employee, too). There are two reasons for this:

1. I want to have room to educate myself further. I e.g. find it hard to research and learn at the job, where urgent much too often gets prioritized before important. Within my responsibilities I can of course set the focus my way, but in the bigger picture it's much harder to convince upper management to focus on important, not urgent. I'm sure though, there are companies that have a better culture here than my current employer.

2. My areas of interest are either notoriously under-payed, work-intensive to get in to or both (science, music, art, etc.). Doing any of these for a living also means compromising on the kind of science or culture you produce.

I therefore decided to find work that is intellectually stimulating at least, but not in my core interests and make room for interests, personal growth and variety on the side.

If the chance arises to combine interests and work better I will definitely take it (maybe in science there is a niche for me), but I see less of a chance there, so I don't focus on this path.

I also might find a profitable side-project that could one day replace my employment. That's another path I would like to keep open (I really like the early start-up phase and starting with a side-project doesn't require a huge financial risk or money for runway).

[TylerJewell]

It's hard for me to speculate how much our PMs are working. No one in our company is micro managing the PMs and their day to day work. But usually, what happens with PMs is that they become accountable for some revenue targets, a set of releases, and a set of customers. These are all things that get scheduled or have targets which have a certain obligation / commitment that must be met. And the PMs just go on about doing that work.

When dealing with incredibly technical products that you are a PM for, almost all of the PMs have a strong passion for the area that they are involved. So there is a blending with personal growth and the products that they are responsible for. I personally am one of a couple PMs on one of our new initiatives at WSO2 where we have 150 engineers. I'm doing it because the technology area is in a domain that excites me, so it does border on being a hobby almost, and therefore I do not count the hours or dollar for dollar pay as much.