[stvswn]

As a PM at a large tech company, I often describe the value of my role as this: we pay engineers a lot of money for their specialized skills. It is great if they can meet with customers, but that can't be 50% of their time, or even 25%. Even worse, they should not be spending their time communicating to executives via slide decks, writing documents for the sales teams, meeting with lawyers, meeting with other teams to negotiate turf battles -- etc., etc. Big companies need PMs because someone has to do all the "stuff." Yes, in the course of doing it, the PM gains some power to set the product strategy and roadmap -- by virtue of being the nexus of all the information -- but this is almost always done in close collaboration with the engineering team anyway. It makes no sense to compete with other companies for valuable engineers who can actually create software and then use up their time doing things that I can do for them. Someone who used to write code but now manages all of the business isn't an engineer anymore, he or she is a former engineer who is now a PM (or an executive perhaps), regardless of the job title.