This is a problem across the civil service, although not as stark as this example usually.
The cult of the generalist has long meant that specific skills are considered almost worthless. Instead of the civil service being an assemblage of people with different skill-sets, it instead consists chiefly of administrators with no more skills than a high-school graduate (although they do have tertiary degrees). Jobs which require actual skill are then farmed out to contractors by these 'generalists'.
The problem is baked into the pay structure, which tends to be based on seniority and how many people you manage rather than skill. You can't just up salaries across the board because then you'd be paying all the unskilled 'generalists' far too much.
They need to completely reorient the civil service away from the notion of generalists, because they're not true generalists. If someone can't code in this day and age they're not a generalist. And if they have no other specialist skill-set besides (say law or accounting) then they shouldn't even be considered professionals. What we have today is a civil service made of pseudo-professionals who in fact do exactly the same sort of work once done by much cheaper clerical staff.
I seriously doubt that the head of cyber security at such a place would ever do any coding. The primary job would be administrative, the needed skill the management of people. 55k is a joke, but lets not pretend that this position requires l33t hacking skills. This is a job about hiring and firing people, about selecting policy and judging the qualification of prospective contractors. And it's a job about writing reports and presenting them to higher authorities and investigative committees, not the sort of things taught at bootcamps.
But if you never did any coding, you may not understand enough to effectively lead a team of people who do that.
For example, how are you going to understand what's going on or resolve technical conflicts? Just outsourcing all the decisions probably makes you much less useful.
The people this manager leads will also not be coders. Governments make virtually no software and any of that would be in a group that is still not connected to the group overseeing overall security.
If he has a windows machine he is familiar with what it does on Tuesdays.. From there its learning about CVEs, etc..
Can't talk about this department specifically, but the UK government does have a tech department (GDS, Government Digital Service), and they're actually really good, especially in accessibility.
Such skills are certainly a bonus, but they would not be a requirement. It is common thinking that every good general should first have been a good footsoldier. The reality is that the vast majority of great generals never were. The most important skills for senior leaders to succeed are rarely similar to those needed to succeed on the front lines of any project.
Actually, was a manger in the private sector (legal) and am now in the public sector (military). I have seen both sides and have seen managers succeed and fail in both transitions.
Head of cyber security at a private company would be somebody with a career of hands-on security work, that has moved up into management. This person would absolutely know how to do the job of their reports.
Because this isnt a private company. This person first needs the skills to integrate and exist within a government structure. Management of public employees within a government is very different than at will employees within a private organization. Working under politically appointed or elected adminstrators is also very different than working for a CEO.
I’ve had the misfortune to work with Accenture acting on behalf of the UK government. They’ve somehow managed to stretch a software project 2 years past delivery date, bleeding the UK taxpayer dry the whole time. At no point have these people shown even a shred of professionalism or competence.
All the while I’m not even sure the boffins at Whitehall even realise they’re being robbed blind. But to be fair, if it wasn’t Accenture robbing them, it’d be some other firm doing the same thing in the same way.
But you don't realize the name of the game in government is to "reasonably sabotage" projects to safeguard the existence of your own position. The costs this leads to are absolutely amazing because you cannot do anything, ever, anywhere. In one position I was baffled, but contacting someone reporting to me ... took a week. And not because he was being hired or on vacation.
This is why the government uses outside contractors in the first place.
the beaurocracy problem.... created to solve a specific need of the people, but once staffed, the goal of the beaurocracy becomes ensuring that its budget increases year over year.
How often is it the case that some official in government has an interest in Accenture, or whatever company, and it is in their interest for that company to win contracts, and then simply stretch those contracts out as long as possible, while the interested official continues their influence in retaining the contract? Or perhaps I'm overly cynical.
There are 3 kinds of consultants - experienced civil service employees that were poached because they were underpaid - so now the consultancy pays them 80k instead of 50 but charges them out for a fortune.
Or they are generalists working for the consultancy, and are about as skilled as the civil servants themselves.
Only a small fraction of consultants are really so specialised that you only need the expertise occasionally and should be contracting them
Much like unpaid internships, the paths and positions of power are made unattractive to intelligent and hardworking people who lack generational wealth to work for free or far less than market value, especially when cost of living is so high.
I'm Canadian, but there is a difference between civil servants and the management.
I'm guessing that it's the same.
Your frontline civil servants aren't the wealthy ones, they are working a job.
It's their bosses and directors, who control the budgets, and can decided who get's the juicy private contracts.
Isn't the PM from a very wealthy family? That's the sort of thing I am talking about, not the civil servant working at the DMV (or it's equivalent) counter.
PM has two parents who are doctors, which is far, far from poor, but not really generational wealth. He did marry into money, though. Neither of the last two came from illustrious backgrounds.
This is a heavily massaged story built for a life long politician. (One hole in the story is only giving I think his mothers family background. There was clearly ~500k to buy a pharmacy early after 'penniless' immigration)
Civil service is also government's secret graduate job creation program. Can't get hired by private sector beyond counter jobs, civil service welcomes you. It's a racket through and through
I think it's a more a case of "don't attribute to maliciousness what can easily be explained by stupidity"; i.e. the powers that be a trying to cut their way to success.
I get a lot job offers in my LinkedIn inbox and newsletters from places like glass door as I like to keep my eye on the market. One thing I’ve been seeing a lot recently is salaries for dev roles steadily dropping in the UK.
The concerning thing, in my opinion, is that the poster linked by OP seems disillusioned as to the standard of living in the UK. They specifically mention being paid £55k as being equivalent to $100k in the US. It isn’t.
£55k in London is about enough to rent a place and live ok’ish on your own, and relatively comfortably if you have a partner whom is also earning a salary in a similar bracket.
Rent on a 1 bedroom flat in zone 5 is costing £1,500 as a minimum. You then have council tax which is about £200 a month (soon to be increased). If you travel to the city to go to the office that is gonna cost you at least £50 a week, more if you need to go everyday. Your utilities will cost you at least £100 a month and food, without takeaways is also going to cost you about £50 a week.
All the costs above are lowballing intentionally and do not factor in things like the inevitable lunch coffee and after work drinks, albeit non alcoholic. The reality is that the UK is becoming a much less livable place and that the cost of living/energy/whatever comes next is always passed down to the average person.
I will not be surprised to see an exodus of skilled workers over the next decade. I personally have set a 5 year target for leaving the country personally, which is sad. My partner has noticed the change herself and is equally as sad that the reality is she will need to leave (after working to acquire citizenship) in order to have a proper chance at buying a home and living a happy life.
> They specifically mention being paid £55k as being equivalent to $100k in the US. It isn’t.
I think you're missing some benefits. I don't know anything specific about this job offer and what would be on the paper offer, but UK public sector offers quite insane benefits compared to private sector, where salary might be like 50-60% of total compensation. Some I'm failiar with: free access to public nurseries (normal price was around £1200/monthy), 50% of costs for private high school, high retirement employer contributions, refunds for all public transport tickets used to get to work, access to gym, swimming pool, sauna, massage and therapies with max. 1 entry per day, free car parking during working days and weekends (otherwise £3-5 per hour), up to £100 per month for books - and this doesn't include annual training budget.
While the cash is quite low and won't get you far with luxury holidays abroad, it offers very high living standard in the UK.
If you are the sort of person positioned to take advantage of those benefits, many of which are aimed at people with young families: some kids, but not so many that you want a larger living area. This serves to narrow the field of prospective applicants to those of a paticular social and cultural class. A single person whith hobbies outside the narrow field of acceptability will not apply. Anyone who would rather go on a backpacking trips than endulge in spa days would rather have the money than the spa benefit. In the end, such specific benifit packages tend to promote a very paticular london lifestyle.
Agreed - my ex has spent her whole career in the public sector and the benefits are indeed insane. IIRC the pension was especially lucrative (from my POV), it was something like min ~20% employer contribution but I could be remembering incorrectly.
I wonder why they don't advertise all the benefits more explicitly in public sector job listings.
Yeah I’m not sure if it is just one section of the public sector this poster is referring to but my sister is a teacher at GCSE level and gets none of this.
One of my best friends is a paramedic and has decided to quit and leave the country due to the shocking pay and working conditions. He has to bail on so many social events as he constantly gets assigned to unrelenting shifts with no notice at all.
Is not? I don't see any argument for that not being correct. Everything you said about costs, sounds that exact same as $100k in the US. Unless you live in North Dakota, chances are you are paying pretty close to the same percentages for rent/foot in a larger city such as San Fran or Chicago.
Not exactly sure what zone 5 is, but a rough search gave me $2500 for rent in Chicago, which is about double £1,500 (roughly), council tax probably doesn't exist, but travel in Chicago is certainly going to be WAY more than "£50 a week". And GOOD luck finding utilities for "at least £100", internet alone is probably $50 US, cell phone another $40 US, power, heat, hot water, depending on apartment is probably another $100 US. Food for "£50 a week" is also a dream I would expect food to be closer to $200 USD a week. Unless you're living on ramen.
Everything I see adds up to that being about correct.
London is basically one big urban circle. Everything in London is directed towards the centre of the city. Zone 1-6 is roughly a measure your distance from the centre of London, which is also the centre of economic activity with many international HQs, banks, insurance markets, government departments, and startup offices based there. Its also where all of the major entertainment and tourist locations are.
Zone 1 is typically very expensive. Typically, with some variation, it gets less expensive as you go to outer zones. Zone 5/6 is getting to the outer reaches of the city, and historically was much more affordable at the cost of >60 minute commutes into zone 1 and higher fare costs.
You also need to keep in mind that the marginal tax rate can be very high. This is esp true for UK university graduates that typically are repaying what is technically a "student loan", but even the government's statisticians call a tax because almost nobody will pay it off in their lifetime given the repayment terms. Many graduates have marginal tax rates in excess of 50% on incomes above roughly 40k.
Zone 5: London's public transport has a fare system based on concentric circles. Zone 1 is the centre. Zone 5 housing used to be affordable on average Joe wages.
But that covers your healthcare. No copays, deductibles, flat rate for all prescriptions of £9.50 per item (or £10.40 a month for 10 months for a prepayment certificate that covers as many items as needed).
Insurance is also less, both contents and car insurance. Utilities a lot lower (fast internet for £30 a month, sim only contract with 50GB of 5G data for £15 a month).
There is this strange idea that the UK is super expensive, and whilst not cheap, a lot of things are decidedly cheaper in the UK than they are in the US.
Also student loans - universities are capped at £9250 per year, so you've not got hundreds of thousands in student loan debt to pay off either.
> But that covers your healthcare. No copays, deductibles, flat rate for all prescriptions of £9.50 per item (or £10.40 a month for 10 months for a prepayment certificate that covers as many items as needed).
Which has now collapsed so in practice you need to go private if you need any kind of decent, timely care. And it never covered dentistry from what I’ve heard.
In practice you end up paying twice - once in taxes for the dysfunctional health service you can’t actually use, and a second time in the form of either insurance or out of pocket to go private when you do need healthcare.
It's not collapsed. My father had a TIA a few months ago, the ambulance was there in minutes, and he was treated in hospital and has made a full recovery.
If you have a life-threatening issue, MI, stroke, cancer - you will be seen quickly and the standard of care is similar to the US.
If you need something treating that is non-life-threatening, yes, you may need to wait some time.
Don't get me wrong, the NHS is being handled appallingly by the current ruling party, but it is not collapsing - thanks to the doctors, nurses and support staff going above and beyond to keep it running.
> My father had a TIA a few months ago, the ambulance was there in minutes
Sure, but there are plenty of anecdotes about ambulances taking hours to arrive right now, as well.
"Life-threatening" is also too fuzzy of a term, here. Don't get me wrong -- I'm an immigrant to the UK from the US, and I think things are better here for most people -- but mental health issues, gender-affirming care, etc. are not treated as life-threatening even when they genuinely are, and care is nearly impossible to get in a timely manner. I'm not especially well-connected to the trans community, but I have some friends who are, and it's quite common for trans people in the UK to move to the US because they can access care much easier and much faster.
Additionally, objective measures of wait times show them increasing unsustainably right now. :(
Like, I live in Zone 2 with a rent of £1600/month, including heating. My previous place (only a few months ago) was £1450, also in Zone 2. My company is revving up hiring, and we've definitely not seen salaries decrease. If anything, we're prepared to pay more to basically anyone who isn't a new grad.
So I live in zone 3 in south west london and my rent is 1500pcm. I signed that rental contract in 2021, but since then average rents in my area have gone up 25% (my salary has gone up by ~10% in that time). My contract is coming up for renewal, and I'm bracing myself for 1800-1900 terms from my landlord. This has happened everywhere in London - 15% increases in the past year alone.
Seriously questioning whether to stay in London itself, but even outside of London rents have gone up crazy amounts given the average salaries of those areas. This country is starting to become unaffordable despite the fact that I'm technically >97th income percentile.
My council tax in zone five for a mid range priced terraced 3 bedroom house is below £200 a month before the single person deduction (25%).
Literally the first search for a 1 bed property to rent in zone 5 (Croydon, specifically), showed up several around 1100/month. The furnished ones in the more expensive new-builds certainly are around the 1500/month range. Those are in band A, while my house is in band D, so even lower council tax, before taking into account the single person deduction.
E.g. a single person in a band A property in Croydon will pay around 1200/year in council tax. Varies by borough, of course.
I have to assume other young people, like myself, want a mostly furnished place because dragging a ton of furniture around is very annoying. Especially when you're forced to move around every few years because the rents keep hiking up.
And I don't think the adverted price are representative of how much you'd end up paying in just rent. My current place went up £200/mo from £1800/mo advertised, because the agent went back to us (and the other applicants), telling us other people's offers, and goading us into increasing our offer.
Anecdata: I share a 2 bed in Ealing, £2000/mo in just rent, council tax band D which adds about another month's rent a year.
If I weren't working in finance and paying more to make up for my housemate's lower salary (my ~70k/yr to his ~£30k/yr) there's no way we'd be able to afford this place. We'd have to find somewhere in a worse location, with poorer quality, or both.
My girlfriend shares a 2 bed and pays 850/month for her share. If you want to live in the most attractive places, then sure, you will be bidding against people.
The point, though, was that lower prices are available. If you choose not to take advantage because it's not as convenient as you like, that's a valid choice (though if you opt for several hundred pounds difference a month to avoid calling a removals firm once every few years, I question that choice; been there, done that, it's not that much effort)
To be clear, housing prices in the UK are atrocious, even if it's possible to do better than the person above stated.
Personally I'd favour the government basically forcing prices down by guaranteeing to pour money into added construction until the market crashes. I'm saying that as a homeowner because for most people, me included, it'd be better if the prices come down so we can afford to trade up, and it'd be cheaper to provide for some limited bailouts for people left with mortgages under water, than to continue having this massive drag on the economy because it's now advantageous for developers to sit on land and wait for it to appreciate before building as an exit (e.g. one of the plots near my local station that is finally being built on now was standing empty for over a decade before the owner of the land started doing anything).
I've lived in Croydon for 20 years, after living multiple other places in London. While it has some real shitholes, it also has plenty of great places. Most of Croydons reputation is down to places most people who live in Croydon never see.
The 1100/month flats I saw were in calm, green, solidly middle class areas with walking distance to several large parks, shops, and great transport links.
Most of Croydons reputation is down to crime rate mate. Overall third highest in London and especially significant and growing in the violence against the person category.
In addition to my other reply, what's your source for the crime rate?
This [1] and this [2] suggests Croydon is about halfway down the borough list per capita, with matched better what I remember from looking at Met numbers in the past. Croydon is the second most populous London borough, so in absolute number of crimes it is usually high up the list, but per capita it's for a long time been pretty much middle of the road, again pulled up by the poorer parts of the borough (particularly, as far as I remember, the Northernmost parts most urban parts, and estates like Addington and Fieldway.
And again: Mostly in areas most people in Croydon don't frequent. Croydon is large, and ranges from leafy suburbs with private roads and mansions to run down estates.
I pay £1550pcm in a fairly new build in Stratford/Olympic Park, ~60sqm. Used to pay the same (until January) for ~55sqm in Canada Water, but for an older build. These are 1 bed flats I'm talking about.
I do have to say, though, the process of finding them was quite stressful.
In tech (which is what is relevant to this post), pay is much higher in US tech hubs than it is in London. I had to move from tech to finance (still in a tech role) in order to get anywhere near my Seattle-based tech salary when I moved to London.
I am just curious where would you go? In my eyes today’s Germany is also bad choice for working and living comfy lifestyle. It was nice low wage country with dirt cheap groceries and not too expensive housing. Now it is still low wage country with high cost of living.
Keep in mind those are people who purposefully moved to Australia. I know plenty of Aussies here in London who left Australia, usually due to poor job opportunities or culture.
> I will not be surprised to see an exodus of skilled workers over the next decade. I personally have set a 5 year target for leaving the country personally, which is sad.
My preference is the Netherlands but it is obviously a joint decision which needs to be made by both myself and my partner.
We are both working in tech so finding a job shouldn’t be an issue. She is an EU national by birth so automatically has the right to work and live there. I would need to jump through hoops as a result of the big B :/
As I understand it, Head is what you call someone that's leading a group of people and they don't have the on-paper experience to do it, or you don't want to give them the title for any other reason. Also why startups tend to have more "heads" of things and at some point shift to having VPs
This aligns with my experience. I used to work at a department that had a "Head". She never talked to anybody or delivered any tangible work. I still wonder what her real job was.
If you entire IT team is 40, it's plausible to assume that the entire security team is these 2 analysts and their sought-after boss.
Even if it's "a" head, why would anyone qualified for leading an infosec team be interested?
For the same reason that anyone works in the civil service. It's a very restrained pace of life, you literally have to count your hours and take time off to ensure you don't work more than 37.5 hours a week, there's flexibility to work from home and your working hours, the pension and the benefits are fantastic. If you live to work then this job isn't for you, but it's quite a nice job if you're not that invested in it.
> If you live to work then this job isn't for you, but it's quite a nice job if you're not that invested in it.
Seems like that would attract bullshitters who deliver the minimum they can get away with, and given it's the government and there will be no (skilled) oversight, they will get away with it and the mediocrity feedback loop continues.
Actually it tends to be the opposite, it ends up filled with highly qualified experts in their fields who are happier with a good work-life balance. Because it's government everything moves very slowly and there is very limited scope for advancement (the government doesn't grow like a company, and there's no outside competition so you can't jump to new jobs as much) so it's not a good place for bullshitters to thrive because you're going to be there a long time and if you get found out as a bullshitter no one will tkae you seriously. You can't just bullshit through a few years and then move to a different department or get a promotion, everything moves so slowly that if you start screwin things up people will actually notice (they won't fire you though).
I'm not sure this would apply to the near-poverty-level salary talked about here? It's one thing to give up the top-level salary for a smaller-but-still-comfortable one, but the one we're talking here is absolutely terrible (lookup taxes and the cost of living and housing especially in London)?
I'd expect only those who really have nowhere else to go to settle for this, which again implies lack of skill.
> if you get found out as a bullshitter no one will tkae you seriously
Unless everyone is a similar bullshitter, or you play the (office?) politics game properly to compensate for your lack of skill. If bullshitters were universally discredited everywhere like you say, politics as a job would disappear overnight.
If you're paid less, it generally means you're less useful to the society. They value you protecting the UK treasury less than they value you making silly landing pages. You can chill making landing pages just as well, just make them part-time.
It might represent your value in the free market in terms of economic utility, but that doesn't reflect your value to society. There are things in this world outside of pure economic measurement.
Outsiders miss the underlying class struggle here. When an employer underpays a position the door opens to nepotism and class discrimination. If the pay is below a reasonable wage for the associated costs, ie living in london, only those with outside income will apply. They take the position for the prestige and power the office conveys rather than the money paid. So it goes to the son-in-law of someone important, some upstart who needs a fancy stamp on the resume to justify his inevitable next appointment up the civil service hierarchy. Several New York law firms do this. Pay new lawyers nothing and you are free to hire only from a narrow group of legal and political families. Also, every political party filling campaign positions with "volunteers" hoping to get a position of power if the condidate wins office. They are all sons and daughters from political families.
Once upon a time many high positions did not pay. Some even required regular payment from the office holder. Want to be near the seat of power in london? Want the ear of the king? That will cost you. Ever watch tales about The Three Musketeers? In reality, the musketeers were drawn from elite families because they had to cover all of thier own costs. It was a prestige position for sons of power wanting to work near the palace.
I just don’t see that here at all. I read it as a job title that sounds more senior than it is, potentially underpaid for the civil service, with the numbers looking extra low because of the weird way that much comp comes in non-salary benefits (which some may not want).
Certainly I don’t think this position is some kind of reverse-sinecure that pays in political power. Mainly because I think it doesn’t really wield much power.
I don’t know which law firms you’re talking about but there are others which pay graduates well and I’m not really sure it’s very relevant to the discussion.
Could it simply be, that these types of jobs (high rank, low pay) are reserved to wealthy people? It might be so that the only ones that can apply are people for which the salary is a mere formality - it's just listed because it might be mandatory for the paperwork. Kind of similar to how artificially high housing cost is some sort of gatekeeping/community control and not actually reflecting demand in some places...
What the job actually gets you (mandate, network, access, decision power, ...) is the real value money couldn't buy otherwise.
But then again this argument might be wrong, because if it were the case why list the job in the first place?
The answer is much simpler, it's simply not a high power job. It's an inflated job title for the person in the IT department who leads a team of 2 people focused on cyber security. It reports into the IT department (which obviously at the treasury isn't really an important department), and is several levels away from senior leadership. In the private sector this role would be the most junior level of management- something like "Lead" or "Supervisor" not the head of a department.
Pay is just low at lots of private companies in the U.K. You may not get a php developer who knows they could easily get more, but you might get someone who has spent their career at companies that somehow get away with paying much less.
Without knowing the details, not really. That's more for people in Parliament these days, not the Civil Service.
£55k in London is junior management level pay in the London, if that.
Unless this is a case of give an incredible title for a junior member of staff to make it sounds attractive, then this is reallllly low pay for that type of job.
Embarassingly low. Kind of, "I have no idea what a Head of Cyber Security" does so let me price it at £55k.
Honestly, this is something a 2 person startup might do ... not The Treasury of a leading (?) country.
As others said, it is a junior role -- "a head", not "the head" that will (from a job description) manage a 2-person team in a 40-person org pretty far removed from leadership.
Not a “wealthy” person, but rather someone from a a large tech/outsourcing co that will get massive contracts and thus the “revolving door” of “public private partnerships” continues …
Dunno if it's for a rich person but most likely they want to give it to someone they know and they just have to legally post it publicly before that. And putting such low salary insures no one with good credentials will ever take it.
They are able to prepare individual arrangements for the 'right' candidate. The secretary of each ministry typically has delegation to increase starting salary and issue 'special bonuses', and there should be an oversight committee.
The inverted commas don't suggest misuse or abuse, just that it's completely different in every case.
Alternately, they could be forced to find a UK resident first, before hiring a foreigner. First, you make an ad with requirements that have 0 possible candidates. You wait a few weeks as a proof that you tried to hire locally. Then you make a semi-hidden ad with the real position and salary*
*happened in my country. Position for a software engineer with 1.5x min wage salary.
They’ll get someone who wants it on their resume and wants the network so they can move to private sector and sell back to the same department. The ole public-private two-step.
It seems to be a tactic some nefarious companies are resorting to. They dish out titles like candy to capture cheaper labour and to "upcycle" people in their career ladder.
Managing Director, Head Of Research, Chief of Staff,etc.
Then those roles have vice or assistant as modifiers to multiply how many roles they have.
Then they go further, they split their company units into actual companies and group it under a "Group". So now each one of those entities has their own CEO, Director, Managing Director, Head of, etc.
You know it's bad when a single company of barely 500 people has 5 CEOs, 50 C-level roles and countless meaningless titles given to downright incompetent individuals.
Unfortunately encountered one such company that I won't name. Needless to say, they were a crappy client.
Not only in management. After some recent interviews I did, I'm finding more and more companies looking for "lead developers" and "tech lead" or some variation, but what is actually expected of them is a "almost-senior developer that also interviews", since someone else (often a CTO) will be micromanaging the team's tech decisions and another manager will be, well, managing.
It is a bit funny to ask "so what's the difference between this role and that of a senior engineer in the same team" and getting people to freeze.
The Treasury issues around 15bn GBP (~18bn USD) of bonds every month. There are multimillion pound "opportunities" to leak information about which bonds will be issued (because that'll cause that curve sector temporarily to cheapen up). Paying the paltry sum of 55k for someone who can reasonably be expected to have access to this information, is a signal that they don't take seriously the risk of being fleeced for 2 or more orders of magnitude more than that every month.
This has caused a bit of a stir because the UK hasn't quite understood the relative weakness of wage growth for the last 10 years. The culturally understood milestones of "high pay" 30/50k have also not increased with inflation.
I get paid well for the UK - but I could triple or even quadruple my salary in the US/Australia. Combined with relatively high taxes (my marginal tax rate is 60%) - it isn't a great value proposition for many professionals, and despite the luxuries (healthcare, gun control) - almost everyone I know is eyeing the exit.
The worst thing about it all is our healthcare is barely even a benefit anymore. You’d be more likely to find a leprechaun than get an appointment with a doctor and don’t get me started on dentistry.
Ha! From your surname I'm assuming you have some ties to India?
There are companies that specialise in medical tourism but I wonder how feasible it would be for an individual who was completely unfamiliar with India.
You are correct about my ties to India but it is super feasible for someone without any ties.
The one thing I would stress is to do your research before going and find a credible medical centre. Booking appointments in India for dentists or doctors is pretty painless — very often you can get seen for a consultation in the same day, sometimes within minutes.
The one benefit of having ties to the country is that I have family on the ground whom already know of reputable doctors/dentists which makes it easy to avoid the horror stories (which are in the minority).
To clarify my experience: I had a root canal in the UK after being attacked with a weapon which crushed my front teeth.
I regularly got abscesses in the area for years and they were always treated with antibiotics and a pat on the head.
It flared up while I was visiting family in a very small village in Punjab and they sent me to their dentist.
It turned out that the dentists in the UK had been wrongly diagnosing and treating what turned out to be a root canal which was not properly completed (the dentist failed to remove the entire root).
This lead to an infection which grew over the period of roughly 12 years and spread into the actual bone of my jaw, eating away at it.
I needed a re-canal and an operation to remove the infection. Over the course of two weeks I had the operation and re-canal completed for roughly £50.
It’s been two years and there have been no problems at all.
Where are you based? I'm in central London and - whilst I agree it has been and could be better - have had no problem getting an appointment. Most of it is app based now, right? I'll message in the morning or the night before, a doctor will video call within 48 hours (usually, but often same day) and will ask me to come in if I need to. Otherwise they'll just prescribe after the call and send the prescription to my local pharmacy.
Hackney, Islington, Tower Hamlets, Greenwich - definitely my experience. People are definitely trying, even if it doesn't always work. Hope you get a bit more lucky next time!
Personal allowance tapers after 100k, making the effective marginal rate 60% between 100-125k. If you include student loan payments too, it's actually more like 69%!
There are other even more extreme marginal rates hidden in the tax system if you have children, I believe there are even some circumstances of >100%
Absolutely. The 60% marginal rate will still kick in somewhere though, with the recent increase in annual pension allowance I guess it would be 160-185k, which would actually make it 65% as it'd be on top of the additional rate.
Healthcare is free in UK of course and this is hug compared to US situation, but I do have a few older friends who moved to EU simply because there are countries with as good healthcare and much less waiting.
I don't think that's the case - looking at levels.fyi, London pays more than anywhere outside the US and Switzerland. Definitely more than Australia, despite a lower cost of living.
The thing I don't get about it is that not all UK public services are like this. I know as a fact that senior programmers with the NHS make 70-80k. A project lead can get close to 100k. No idea what the Treasury is thinking here.
This one was discussed recently, and it was pointed out that from the bullet points of the listing it appears to be an inflated title for a mostly administrative role liaising with the govt's actual cybersecurity professionals and training a couple of apprentices.
Plus of course, they may already have an internal candidate and simply advertise it for policy requirements, with a view to only considering applicants if they're much more qualified
Civil service requires line reports for certain pay bands so they may well have hired the apprentices to justify this fat salary for the individual contributor.
The job will likely be filled by a candidate from elsewhere in the CS e.g. ex police on thierv way to a date cheque in the private sector. I imagine this would make a very good stepping stone to a senior cyber job in financial services.
I was just thinking this. Know many NHS tech people in my circle. None earn 70k+.
Contractors potentially but they'd generally be on 100k+ if the rates are at all competitive. Though contracting has dwindled in recent times because of the IR35 legislation and org budgets.
I'm very much on the lookout for IT contracting gigs and don't come across many at all for the NHS.
It would be interesting to see what the pension is like for this position - you're giving up lifetime earnings for retirement earnings (and "serving your country").
UK civil service is a defined benefit scheme that each year from state pension age pays 1/42 of your average salary multiplied by the number of years you worked there. It's inflation linked. You also need to contribute several percent of your salary (various bands). The Government Actuarial Department modelling implies a cost to the employer of around 30% of basic salary.
The government is a special place where unskilled employees make much more than they would in the private sector, and highly skilled or leadership positions make much less than they would in the private sector. The main benefit is that you are essentially unfireable unless you commit a crime. The results are quite predictable.
A bit of a detraction from the link but can anyone who's lived for a significant amount of time in both the UK and the US confirm that £100k is equivalent to $200k?
It seems fairly unlikely to me as UK tax and NI would be around 50% plus everything you purchase has 20% VAT. Sure medical insurance in the US is insane but surely that doesn't quite cover it.
I worked at Coinbase making 140k GBP in base compensation.
My SF based colleagues with the same job title were making 250k USD (so 202k GBP).
We sat down one day and compared our household budgets line by line and in the end we estimated that 'money left over' for equivalent house, medical and kids education my American colleagues were slightly better off, but maybe only by 5-10k USD per year.
Bare in mind at the time coinbase also paid above market rate in London (London rates were cut for new hires shortly after IIRC) (I also worked at CB London)
140k is an incredible salary in the UK though, like top 0.1% at least.
It's also hard to compare things 1:1 - since the NHS is "free" (via taxation), but it doesn't cover dentistry at all really whereas equivalent good US health insurances will do.
The fact that people living in SF managed to be ahead by anything proves there's a massive delta, especially since you're wording this in past-tense (SF has gotten cheaper depending on the timeline you consider)
I think it’s a bit hard to make direct comparisons because the US is more varied in things like tax policy or having multiple important cities.
For a while, the strong pound made it seem like people in the U.K. were well paid compared to most developed countries (not the US which tends to have higher pay than basically any other medium or large country) but I think this was mostly just the strong pound and purchasing power wasn’t much higher in the U.K.
The pound has fallen a lot in the last decade and I think various numbers like pay have been somewhat sticky and not really gone up to match the increased cost of imports.
To attempt to make a comparison, if you live in central London vs Manhattan, tax rates will be comparable (maybe more so if you double both gross salaries), rents in Manhattan will be something like 2x (probably more) based on apartment type but you’ll potentially get something bigger/nicer in NY (ie partly it is about a difference in the average unit, but if all you can get is a large apartment, you have to pay for all of it so controlling for such qualities isn’t so relevant). Rent controls mean that the supply of apartments is less than might be expected based on the number of housing units In Manhattan. Groceries (in Manhattan) are more expensive, as are things like restaurants. The comparison doesn’t feel totally crazy to me.
Other US cities may be different though, eg I don’t know how the taxes/rent would work out in SF or the Bay Area or Seattle or Chicago. There isn’t really much of an alternative to London in the U.K. in the same way that there are many ‘top’ cities in the US and tax policy is much more uniform between locations.
I earn well above that and my effective tax rate is well below 50%. The top marginal rate is 47% except for a narrow band due to phase out of personal allowance, but my effective rate is lower.
With respect to VAT, it nudges my total tax paid up about 4 percentage points. Total, including VAT, NI, and council tax is still well below 50%.
Remember, you're not going to spend nearly all of your pre tax earnings on VAT rated goods and services, given you pay tax and housing andany other things which does not incur VAT.
It’s worth considering employer payroll taxes which might be different (though my memory from looking it up a while ago was that the payroll taxes weren’t so different). It’s also possible to have another effective 9% marginal tax from student ‘loans’ though that will go away after a while.
It's not normal to count payroll taxes as part of the employers tax, as that would also increase the gross salary above that which the employee considers their salary to be. E.g. nobody factors that in when comparing California salaries to the many US states with no payroll tax.
Even so, you need to get up towards 300k GBP/year to exceed 50% even with the payroll tax. And that assumes you're making zero pension contributions (as contributions are offset against your tax up to 40k gross/year)
With respect to student loans, sure, you can add that in but then you need to do that when comparing to the US salary levels in this thread too.
Payroll taxes matter to some extent when comparing employment in different tax regimes because they determine (some of) the total cost to the employer. They can also matter for contracting arrangements. Though the local job market probably matters more.
Yes, but the sub-thread here started with someone suggesting they'd be paying 50% tax, and when talking in terms of employees, it's not normal to include it. When including it, we're usually talking about total tax wedge rather than tax rate (e.g. see OECD Taxing Wages).
Even so, as noted, you'd not hit 50% even with payroll taxes at anywhere near the income levels stated. At the stated 100k GBP contracted salary, your "salary" including payroll tax would be 113,207 GBP, and your total tax wedge would be 41% (compared to 33% combined income tax and NI).
Fair point. I was mostly responding to the bit from the root comment about the comparison between countries and not their incorrect understanding of taxes in the U.K.
£100k in the UK a top 10% wage for the country, but the wages in the UK are massively skewed towards London and the South East.
As for the tax, we have progressive taxation in the UK. Earning £100k, you'd pay 0% on the first 12.5k, 25% on the next 70k or so, and 45% on the last 27.5k (numbers are from memory so they might be a little off). High wage earners are not giving up half their income in tax. That'd be silly.
Basic rate of 20% on earnings between £12,571 and £50,270.
Higher Rate of 40% on earnings between £50,271 and £125,139.
Additional Rate of 45% on earnings from £125,140. (this is from the tax year starting next week, it used to be £150k instead of £125k)
You also gradually lose your tax-free allowance if you make over £100k so there's a weird dead zone in which your marginal rate is something like 60%.
Then there's NI which is effectively tax too but isn't listed in the bands above. Someone on £150k is paying 40% tax and NI (total, not marginal). Not quite half but it's not low either.
(You could get to more than 50% deductions if you factor in student loans)
The problem is most people simply aren't rich enough. The effective tax rate of our current, and richest, prime minister was only 22%. I'm on the low end of the higher rate bracket and already pay more than that, before counting NI/loans.
People assume wrongly but not everything has 20% VAT in the UK/EU and in the US not everything has the sticker price on it (think tips + sales tax + a lot of BS fees or friction as well around) so calculations have to consider those
1) That's the salary range they've specified, if the right applicant comes along they can probably stretch a good deal. My last work was for the gov., and even though they had a specified salary range in the job listing, they paid 20%-30% more to certain hires.
2) These types of jobs come with a certain "prestige" attached to them, which can open doors later - much, much higher paying and powerful doors. And that's a general thing when it comes to such jobs, people are willing to slash their paycheck in half if it's powerful enough
3) The type of applicant for these jobs are (in my experience) much more driven by ideology than money. Gov. jobs can never compete on salary, that's just a fact of life. But they do still get excellent applicants, that are burning for certain things
4) Many of these applicants don't need higher salaries - they're already financially independent.
Who's qualified will be decided by some bureaucrat who couldn't tell ICMP from NSFW.
Master of Science from Doddaballapura Imperial College? Say no more.
Ransomwaring the UK Treasury would be awesome.
Taxes are paid automatically in the UK to the tax man through a system called "Pay As You Earn - PAYE".
Take home pay is closer to 41k.
If the applicant has a student loan. These might take 30 years to pay off at the default 6% from gross (3.3k). Then there are pension contributions too which are opt-out now at usually 5% gross (2.75k). All deducted automatically.
No remote advertised, the average commute costs £50 a week in London.
The real wage here is 35k~ for someone university educated and wants a retirement pension excluding travel.
It's civil service, which means a defined benefit pension paid by the civil service which is valued at some crazy value - like 27% of salary per year with the employee only needing to contribute something like 5%.
Cost of goods here have in some cases doubled. Not to mention the housing situation, people are selling up to rent because of interest rates driving rent up.
I have had NASA tell me the max pay for a security engineer is $40k. I had to question if perhaps the job was for a security guard at one of their sites or something.
I mean, it's fucking NASA. I'd probably work there for free just to be able to say I'd done it.
"Oh, you got a lot of RSUs for your social media click-tracking? That's nice. I helped bullseye an asteroid 9.6 million km away, potentially saving every life on Earth. But yeah, that new infinite scroll is cool, too."
It's nice to imagine when you're not the one worrying about paying rent.
I work in an interesting area (bioinformatics research) and as expected the pay is pretty dire to match. You do get the warm fuzzies now and again when strangers ask about your job, but the rest of the time is spent wondering if you should move into fintech so you don't have to worry about grocery prices.
Fair, but I'm also sick of hearing Facegoogs whining on this app (and Blind, and elsewhere) about how they're only barely scraping by on $250k and how could anyone ever live on $100k poverty wages. They have to do adtech to survive, don't you see?
250k in the bay area with family is ok but it isn't great. You can live on it but people want nice houses and schools for their kids,etc... so I get where they're coming from. Even for the single people they wanna retire early or whatever. Everyone has different goals I guess
" but people want nice houses and schools for their kids,etc...
Where they're coming from is greed. We don't need to indulge this nonsense.
What if I told you I'm barely scraping by on $5 million TC because hey, do you know how much private jets cost? I can't even buy one outright, you know? I have to lease mine on a time share. It's absolutely embarrassing. My kids get made fun of when I drop them off in Geneva for their ski trip with a rented jet.
Is it? I think having more money than you can spend might be greed but simply getting the best things for yourself isn't. Being rich and being greedy are not the same thing. No problem with having all your needs met. As of like 3-5yrs ago, you needed $7mil to be rich in the US. If you live off 50k/yr you need 35yrs to save up 7mil (without talking about inflation or bay area cost of living). I can see calling billionaires or even people with 10M+ just sitting their in their portfolio and assets greedy but this isn't the 90s, 250k is a lot but not in the bay area in 2023, it would be middle-middle class income, you need 150k more as a household income imo to be anywhere near upper middle class im costal cali.
As for your last paragraph? So what? Do you know what you sound like to someone in africa who lost 3 kids to starvation and has never slept on a bed or eaten meat in years and lost family to preventable disease because the nearest medical care is days away and they have to carry clean water in a bucket from a dirty drying river a dozen miles away everyday? Flipping burgers at mcdonalds is rich for that guy.
Also you mentioned being made of and embarrasing. That's not what I mean, I mean actual best schools and colleges. Safe neighborhoods and good houses with a large enough backyard for kids to play around in and have large pets. Affording good healthcare without relying on insurance claims being approved. Buying your parents and spouses' parents their own place and affording their healthcare. Even in the 90s middleclass families afforded yearly vacations and once every few years international vacation. Not having to burden your kids financially in case you get sick or when you get old. Heck, half marriages end because of money, improving those odds too. Kids not being forced to join the military to pay for college,etc...
I think perhaps you still have a 90s or pre 08 idea of how far money goes. You're not skiing in geneva with your family with 250k lol.
Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on semantics, then, because this statement is close to my dictionary definition of greedy.
> You're not skiing in geneva with your family with 250k lol.
No shit. I'm following your logic to its inevitable conclusion. You think that guy making $5 MM per annum is greedy, but he thinks he's just a regular dude barely scraping by leasing a private jet.
To your point, yes, it's all relative, I just think wealthy techies are wildly out of touch with reality. You think you're the poor, struggling 65th percentile, but you're really closer to the 1% – it's just that you compare yourself to your 0.01% billionaire masters, so you don't "feel" rich.
Listen to yourself: "actual best schools and colleges. Safe neighborhoods and good houses with a large enough backyard for kids to play around in and have large pets"
As though you need to make a quarter million dollars a year for this? Either move to Iowa, or have the grace and self-awareness to shut up forever.
Are you saying you would rather be that janitor than make decent money to support yourself/family? If so, by all means. I don't think most people agree with you though. Or maybe they do, what do I know.
I'm saying everyone who works at NASA, from the infosec people to the people scrubbing the floor contributes to the mission. Lots of worthless startups blather on about their "mission" (~~organize the world's info~~ sell more ads) but NASA means it.
Might be a matter of 'job title inflation' - team is small (2 other analysts) and likely is a subdivision of what is a substantial department. Also, I location is potentially in Darlington, I wonder whether that is the main location given the salary level (55K in London is super low)
It's a problem with all government departments. They can't pay market rates for software engineers. But can hire contractors and third party vendors. Facepalm * 100. That's why body shops like Accenture et al makes a killing in government contracts.
I haven't dabbled too much in the UK market, but I recall interviewing for a low 6 figure position a while ago. Is the gap between public and private jobs that big?
There are only so many high paying jobs. When someone on HN says that they have a £100k+ job in the UK, that means that it's possible for some number of people to get those jobs but not everyone who's on £40k can double or triple their salary, there aren't enough opportunities to do so.
I was a mid level - seniorish engineer at the time. We initially discussed that 6 figure role, but I did not feel ready at all. They said it was fine and that the range for the level below was £75-85k, which I thought was pretty good. It was a big corp in the health industry btw.
It was a combination of factors such as very specific problems being solved in an industry I was clueless about, a tech stack I had never worked with, etc. In that kind of situation I would rather take an IC role initially and step up later on.
1. I'm working with an amazing team. Experience has taught me that there's no amount of money worth working with a bad one.
2. I have a disabled spouse and the public sector has offered quite a bit of flexibility around this (e.g. work from home pre-COVID).
3. Everything is customer focused. No dark patterns or data collection. Everything is open source.
4. Work I can believe in. I've worked on everything from drug delivery to environmentally safe fire exstinguishers to solar tech. Comparatively, the last private sector job I interviewed with would have mostly served was building b2b middleware for crypto firms.
5. Variety. I get to touch a huge range of tech, so the job never gets boring. Among the tasks on my annual review for next year, I'm touching 3D rendering, parsers, GPU computing (not CUDA - can't guarantee the users have an NVIDIA card), computational chemistry, and transitioning our GUI code to a declarative framework. I declared myself a C++ developer, but I once had a single day where I had to edit code in eight different languages (C++, Python, Racket, Tcl, Labview, IDL Wave, Mathematica, Labtalk) and I've worked with at least as many more in production.
6. The pay isn't that big of a difference. My last job offer in the private sector was £50k, but there were enough caveats that it would have worked out about the same in the end.
Side point - is £100k really $200k equivalent in US? With the huge costs here and how costly things are including consumer electronics, shouldn't it be cheaper in US as well? (I just moved to UK from India 6 months back)
I was asking about this line from the linked post:
> Yes, I am simplifying but, most people in the UK on £100k a year will have a lifestyle similar to, if not better than, most people in the US living on US$200k a year.
115k a year in my country (~90k after all taxes), in the suburb of a city with 100k population, gets you the following: mortgage payments for a nice 4 bedroom house, payments for a luxury car, fuel, all necessities like electricity, internet, heating, water, food, etc. After covering all living costs, you will have around 60k of free money left over. Basic necessities like healthcare and education are taken care of by taxes.
Would the left over amount be similar in the US from 115k near a similarly sized city?
It's a US-vs-world thing, not a Europe thing. Looking at levels.fyi, London pays more than anywhere outside the US and Switzerland, and even outpays chunks of the US (albeit not the tech hubs).
The cult of the generalist has long meant that specific skills are considered almost worthless. Instead of the civil service being an assemblage of people with different skill-sets, it instead consists chiefly of administrators with no more skills than a high-school graduate (although they do have tertiary degrees). Jobs which require actual skill are then farmed out to contractors by these 'generalists'.
The problem is baked into the pay structure, which tends to be based on seniority and how many people you manage rather than skill. You can't just up salaries across the board because then you'd be paying all the unskilled 'generalists' far too much.
They need to completely reorient the civil service away from the notion of generalists, because they're not true generalists. If someone can't code in this day and age they're not a generalist. And if they have no other specialist skill-set besides (say law or accounting) then they shouldn't even be considered professionals. What we have today is a civil service made of pseudo-professionals who in fact do exactly the same sort of work once done by much cheaper clerical staff.