Technology salaries in 2025: good times for product managers, bad times for data engineers
A few years ago, there were rumblings that product managers were surplus to requirements, as firms like Meta were cutting them to keep headcount engineering focused. A few more years, and some generative AI developments later, the winds have changed.
Stack Overflow released its 2025 developer survey this month, which broke down salaries for various roles in tech based on over 49k responses. The survey revealed that salaries were up by-and-large across the board, but it said that product managers had the largest salary increase of any role, rising 29.3% to an average of $100k.
More than 10% of respondents came from financial services and fintech, where product has been growing in prominence. JPMorgan, for example, made a big deal of all the platforms and products it was building in its last investor day. Hiring for UX and UI designers has been increasing across finance; the job of a product manager is usually to act as the bridge between these developers and software engineers.
AI may have also played a role. Banks have been celebrating tools that reduce the number of hours engineers spend on laborious tasks; perhaps all those free hours are being used to build new products.
Across the major US investment banks alone, more than 500 product managers have been hired in the past year according to LinkedIn. JPMorgan has multiple product management openings in New York, predominantly at VP level, which pay salaries of up to $200k.
By contrast, it's a less lucrative time to work in data engineering. Salaries there saw the smallest increase, raising 5.1% to $81k. The comparative lack of a raise might be down to firms looking for multi-faceted engineers rather than specialists, who can do the data engineering instead of them. One buy-side technology headhunter, speaking anonymously, told us that "bog standard full-stack java developers" are out of fashion, and that top applicants are now expected to have "python too, and data techniques at the same time."
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