[JohnMakin]

Exactly. Tech unemployment is still extremely low, practically nonexistent. All the tech professionals I know with hard skills that have sought jobs in the last 6 months find them most of the time in less than a month. It's not a struggle for anyone except recruiters and maybe the tech-managerial class that lacks hard skills or a long track record. Gone probably are the days of 400k TC PM's with a degree in communications.

[CoastalCoder]

> All the tech professionals I know with hard skills that have sought jobs in the last 6 months find them most of the time in less than a month.

I'm curious how representative that sample is.

A few months ago the AI startup I worked at pivoted and laid off 15%. AFAIK the majority of us, all very technical, are still looking for work.

Note: My situation may be a little niche. I live in the middle-of-nowhere, USA, so I'm trying to restrict my search to remote jobs. That rules out most of finance, and many Alphabet-related jobs. I really, really hope I don't need to move my family to find decent work.

[sahila]

Salary is an important factor too. In the last couple years, I’ve jumped from two startups to big tech, making 130k, 170k, and now over 300k. I think getting a job again at the former two salary points would be easy but not my current one as much if I were let go.

[tristor]

> Gone probably are the days of 400k TC PM's with a degree in communications.

As a PM, these days never existed. All of the high TC PMs are technical PMs, like myself, who have an engineering background. I was in Eng for more than a decade before I became a PM. MBAs turned PMs never commanded as high of compensation as technical PMs as ICs at any tech company. Technical PMs are in the same salary bands as Eng, non-technical PMs are generally 1 level or half step below in the bands.

There's way too many people that get their impression about what PMs do from "Day in the Life" TikTok videos made by non-technical associate PMs who are a couple years out of college and basically doing the easiest pieces of things.

[ghaff]

When I worked for a computer systems company, pretty much all the PMs had technical degrees of one sort or another, many had worked as engineers, and a fair number had MBAs as well.

But generally, salaries at tech companies weren't as high then. My salary in the late 80s as a PM with engineering work experience and a couple of masters degrees was the equivalent of about $120K today in a major tech hub.

[tristor]

> When I worked for a computer systems company, pretty much all the PMs had technical degrees of one sort or another, many had worked as engineers, and a fair number had MBAs as well.

This is pretty much the same now. I am on a ~40 person Product team and only a small number of people do not have a technical background. The vast majority of IC PMs at higher seniority have a technical background. Most MBAs you meet in tech companies are people who were technical and went back to school, although there are a few PMs that are more focused on business analysis and marketing side (sometimes categorized as PMMs or Outbound PMs in some companies) and these folks tend to be less technical, but also doing less technical work, so that's perfectly okay.

[hgsgm]

PMs make less than Devs at the same level in the company.