Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on shabby salaries While the wages paid by governments seldom match those available in the private sector, it appears that the UK's intelligence, security and cyber agency is a long way short of being competitive in its quest for talent. In a recent job advert, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) sought a lead cyber security expert …
You've never been to the UK, so I guess I can forgive you.
No, it written in a jovial manner, but it wasn't a joke, and he wasn't being sarcastic. There _are_ nice buildings in Liverpool, lots of pubs, and like in most of the UK, the cops don't abuse people who are out having a good time.
You can earn 300k doing the same at any commercial business that cares.
The government pays train drivers significantly more than this. Bad government cyber security allowed the NHS to get taken out nationally and regionally many other times.
Why would you bother?
As for Liverpool, 70% of employment is from the public sector so no change there then.
A few of the franchises have handed their contracts back. Unsurprisingly, the ones that are fully nationalised are the ones that are run the best - TFL, LNER etc
Then in 2020 the Tories decided to effectively nationalise all the railways in the most expensive way possible, by paying all the private companies a huge amount of money regardless of whether they ran any trains.
Those contracts run for another couple of years, unfortunately for everyone trying to get to basically anywhere in England west of the Pennines. Avanti etm.
Northern and TPE are indeed a shitshow, however that's mostly because of the complete and total lack of infrastructure.
It's difficult to run trains on rails that were last renewed in the 1800s, and the Tories refused point blank to do anything about it - instead they burned the money on digging tunnels for a railway joining just outside London to just outside Birmingham.
"That is indeed where the wheels come off the whole scheme."
You wouldn't be suggesting that some local villain might have jacked the scheme up and stolen those wheels, would you? Didn't some famous footy person once get into trouble for making similar suggestions about scousers and wheels?
Employing incompetents in government positions seems to be the British way, though. See starmer, reeves et al, along with their predecessors.
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Nope. Lowest salaries because Civil Service pay squeeze so politicians can pay for their own Place in History. "Essential to national security" makes a whooshing sound as it flies out the paymasters' window. I should know, I'm a cyber/ICT expert in said Civil Service and I get paid the same packet o' nuts as the "Computer says No!" droids all around me. My boss earns a decent screw, but to get someone capable enough they hired in a contractor.
Nail, Hammer, direct hit.
While the politicians are busy point scoring with soundbites aimed at Daily Wail readers, the CS is struggling to keep the talent it needs. Being very careful what I admit to, I'm lucky to work in a bit of the CS that's seen as supporting a very high profile and considered politically important project - so we're doing much better than many of our colleagues. But even that has problems - because we pay better than other bits, it means that those other bits are struggling even worse as they are losing staff to us as well as to industry.
But to have multiple grades on NLW (national living wage) should really stand out as an indicator that things are well past the point of being seriously broken. At current trends, in a few years time my grade will join that not very exclusive club - but hopefully I'll have retired by then.
*interview almost finished*
interviewer> Okay, great. let's talk about your salary package. Now, before you laugh, hear me out until I finish. We can only pay 42 grand, *looks around and whispers* but you'll have access to valuable data and if you are as good as you say, surely you'll be able to flog it on dark web and earn yourself proper income without us knowing. *backs to normal voice* That's why "base pay" is low, to weed out impostors.
expert> That's absurd! I would never do that! *wink wink* 42 grand is a fortune where I live and we have food banks, they even have organic vegetables!
interviewer> Welcome aboard!
It is a plant. These senior civil service types are all oxbridge graduates (or would pretend to be) and could never say:
"earn yourself proper income without us knowing."
What is a first in classics if one doesn't know that the gerund takes the genitive (or somesuch nonsense.)
viz "without our knowing."
If GBP42,000 is going rate for GCHQ infospec specialist I hate to think what the civil service pays its system administrators (BoFHs.) Explains a lot I suppose. Peanuts and Monkeys. We wouldn't want our spooks to be competent, would we?
The Australian public service has the same problem over a wide range of IT and other skill sets which has lead to a heavy dependence on external contractors and consultants paid far above public service pay scales which has attrited the remaining public service staff who can have a salary bump of up to AUD200,000 for the same roles outside. The inflexible public service structures and corresponding relative pay scales set in concrete pretty much ensure there isn't any real possibility of change.
"Makes you wonder if the whole idea is to outsource it to the Big Outfit that gives the best lunches!"
Speaking as a civil servant, that's not actually the case. I'm no longer on the tech side of things at this stage of my career, but I have a functional skill set where I'd get paid vastly more in the private sector (about 50% more) so the shit pay for infosec pros isn't unique, it's across the entirety of the Civil Service. The reason for that is "Civil Service pay restraint" which has been a Conservative religious conviction since forever. But it isn't so they can outsource roles to the big consultancies, it's simply that Conservative policies revolve fundamentally around a deep dislike of the Civil Service, and an obsessive belief that the private sector is better and cheaper (one might ponder on the conspicuous success of private energy supply, private water companies, competition on the railways etc). Many of the Tory blue-rinse brigade hold these views, you often see them shared here.
As a result of poor Civil Service pay, many of the brighter junior staff leave to go and work in the private sector, and those who remain (still often a lot more capable than public opinion gives credit for) aren't going to stretch themselves when CS pay (for a mid grade) has declined by 20% in real terms over the past decade, and when the government for the past decade and a half has openly briefed against and bad-mouthed their own employees. That's where we're at, the Civil Service struggles to motivate it's staff, doesn't pay enough so doesn't have the skills it needs to do a good job in many areas. How things pan out with the latest government remains to be seen, but over the past 15-18 years the CS has been hindered by huge ministerial turnover, lack of competence, sheer laziness, and dishonesty amongst some ministers - and indeed prime ministers. A small proportion of ministers have been excellent: Intelligent, diligent, honest, hard-working and with enquiring minds, but you won't read about them in the news.
Senior leadership in the CS is certainly patchy and should be improved, but that's equally true of the private sector in which I've worked for most of my career. There's perennial rolling disasters (like the bloated and ineffective MoD), and then you've got huge policy disasters that sit at the feet of politicians. Even so, it would help if people understood how democracy works in the UK, and what the role of the Civil Service is, and how the UK's government administration compares to other countries. Most of that information is freely available, but few bother to search out, and instead prefer to regurgitate whatever their chosen news website tells them to think.
From one AC CS to another, very well put.
Will it change anything ? ... checks outside, nope, no porcine aviation taking place, so that'll be a no then.
And will a change of colour in government change anything ? I doubt it, it seems we've changed (at the risk of expressing a political opinion) a bunch of crooks who were at least open about it for another lot that we now find were at the very same things they slagged off the Torys for. Quite why someone on a salary at least 5 time what I get paid, and who gets a free flat in the middle of London, can't buy their own clothes escapes me. I suspect we're in for yet more real terms pay cuts - the only thing that will change is the name they give it.
Must be fun in the pubs in Cheltenham on a Friday night.
"What do you do for a living?"
"Oh, I work in Morrisons"
"Really, I work in Morrisons too! Meet my friends Ruth and Andy, they work in Morrisons as well. Who are you here with?"
"George and Pete. They work in, er Lidl"
Must be fun in the pubs in Cheltenham on a Friday night.
They must be the largest employer in town. Where you work will be no secret - what you do is another matter entirely.
I used to work in non-spooky IT security. The first time I went down there - at about this time of year - I realised that my headlights weren't working, and I'd certainly need them for the return journey.
The guy I was visiting took me along to the local Ford dealer. Checking the car in, the dealer asked for a contact phone number, which I provided.
"OH! YOU'RE AT GCHQ!!!", he yelled.
I wished the ground would swallow me up. Then I looked round, and my GCHQ host was pissing himself laughing.
It's common knowledge.
Problem is anyone within about 4 degrees separation of any security cleared work knows what this means already. And presumably any foreign powers too.
But I guess it stops those few that either do or don't know openly repeating it so it's probably partly fulfilling it's job of keeping the circle fairly close.
The goal isn't to hide that they work for the security services (the car parks at the donut are in full public view), it's to avoid awkward questions, socially, that they're not allowed to answer.
(Many people who work there need all the help they can get when it comes to social situations)
That was the answer we were told to give.
Of course for us Cheltenham wasn't the answer... but Bath was close enough.
But then no one could say "melksham" because that means you'd be working at the nuclear bunker there.... which would mean all your friends and family would want in when WW3 started (after changing the locks to keep out those pesky politicians who think they run the country)
..they're deliberately leaving us open to attack.... .... sabroni
Others perusing the advert would recognise it a call for experts able to successfully carry out/mentor and monitor and further fine tune cyber attacks ..... which necessarily need to be practically anonymous and plausibly deniable and physically invisible and virtually autonomous .... an alien art to master in the quest that challenges perfection to perform failsafe secure tricks and treats that can also easily almightily threaten and vanquish any unpleasant competition or covetous opposition.
They make huge fortunes while just costing the likes of the peanuts that GCHQ wonks are offering and only the fool would not realise a limitless company debit card is the perk to offer such prime boffins for the first person reward appreciated in the expensive third party purchase of worthy business toys.
IT’s not rocket science.and such is all that one needs .... to capture and keep captivated such excellences for feeding and seeding as are definitely needed.
And failure to admit, recognise, accept and effectively address the fact, that unless one is predominant and preeminent in non-attributable cyber attack one is always destined to do vain rear guard action battle against a phantom and fleet of foot target which has moved on to virgin fields of exclusively advantageous novel endeavour that lead to and from the destinations/staging posts that they, your competition and/or opponents, have absolute command and virtually remote almighty control of.
I Kid U Not ‽ .
....working for a US guvmint agency of similar capability you get paid waaay higher.
Yet it must work for GCHQ as they don't actually seem light on capability, often achieving more than their highly renumerated cousins.
Personally though, even though potentially it has some fascinating technical aspects (which you may or may not see as I know its highly compartmentalised even within the donut) that crushing OPSEC/PERSEC oversight wouldn't make it much fun (although I understand the need for it). Nor do I have a desire to live in Cheltenham.
I'll take the six figure commercial salary instead please.
The basic problem is a hierarchy that puts people into grades with a small number of rigid pay steps within each grade. You can't pay them more without increasing the grade and you can't increase the grade as that would impact the management hierarchy above them and lead to senior managers having "technically" more senior and better paid staff working for them. They really do need to focus on paying very large "skill" bonuses.
Exactly that - the NHS has the same problem that jobs are rigidly graded with no accommodation for the market. So as it stands we quite frankly can't get seasoned pros to get out of bed for the sort of money we're offering. That in turn means ... contractors, except we're currently in a "contractors bad" phase so ... body shopping from the consultancies instead.
How does the NHS cope with other technical skills?
Is the manager of a team of brain surgeons simply paid more to be a people manager of them? You can do people management of a team without being able to get your hands dirty and do the technical aspect surely?
Why does pay have to be purely a heirachy?
Thats what needs to be sorted out here...
That's been precisely created for this purpose. To let private sector milk the tax payer.
Workers who actually deliver the services are paid only slightly more than their public sector counterparts, but the companies they are employed in are paid fortune.
Ironically this is something security services should have picked up on, but I guess this is below their pay grade.
In addition, although Agenda for Change was supposed to create equivalent pay both within and across organisations.
This definitely not the case. My Trust tends to have jobs at 1 band lower than other Trusts. They wonder why the cannot recruit or retain staff.
I have known staff resign to go to a neighbouring Trust being offered a band increase to stay. They generally decline as they point out the job at the neighbouring Trust is on that new band but has much lower responsibilities.
An even more basic problem is that the hierarchy values generalists more highly than specialists. The nominal justification would be that generalists are more flexible and can fit in equally well in different roles. Specialist, by virtue of their specialist training can only fit their specialist roles and so are less flexible. Obviously flexibility is seen as valuable and so they are paid more. Of course the reality of this is that the generalists are equally suited to fit multiple roles is because these generalist roles all require none of the knowledge or experience with which their arts degrees did not supply. The hierarchy, of course, sets its own valuations and relative pay and is run by the generalists for whom, in essence, it exists. That none of these flexible generalists are quite flexible enough to take on specialist roles is somehow overlooked.
Yes, once upon a time I was a specialist in the Civil Service. Why do you ask.
IMHO experience it's a fixation on managing numbers of people not skills. You might be a highly qualified specialist that would cost and arm and a leg to replace but because you are a subject matter specialist and not a manager you are not entitled to step up a pay bracket. Whereas the person next to you who has no specialist skills but managed a team of 15 doing something is considered more valuable due to 'management responsibilities'. Market rates and replacement costs are not considered at all.
Partly this is the unions fault who imposed this structure.
Many public sector specialist jobs are now advertised using various loopholes to allow something near to the bottom end of the commercial rates to be paid.
"The basic problem is a hierarchy that puts people into grades with a small number of rigid pay steps..."
Correct. Almost fifty years ago, when I worked at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, it was exactly the same.
I wasn't working on anything important, just things like safeguarding the UK's stocks of fissile materials for nuclear energy and weapons. Yeah, all right, plutonium.
My starting salary was about £3,000 but they held out the carrot that with my excellent qualifications and performance I'd be promoted quickly.
What they didn't mention at the time was that they had some sneaky pay scale points up their sleeves (they called them "professional entry points") which were not published.
After a couple of years I was promoted. With my next pay advice I discovered these sneaky pay scale points. They were paying me ten percent less than the minimum for the grade below me!
The pay rise which I'd been led to expect suddenly evaporated. Nobody had even had the balls to tell me about it.
I had just started building a house, and I had very definite plans for the extra money. Without it there could be no house. I protested.
They said, "But you're so young! There are people here thirty years older than you who aren't on that rate!"
So I worded my protest more strongly. I said, "Either I get the published rate, or I leave", to which the Division Head (Alan Penn) replied, "But you could be promoted again in six months!".
And to which I replied, "I can't afford any more of your promotions."
Alan's hands were tied. So I left. When I joined a small firm selling mostly medical instruments (which at the UKAEA had been one of my suppliers) my salary doubled immediately.
A couple of years later I'd finished building the house. I gave up on the idea of a career in science and engineering, it was never going to pay me well enough. Setting up a firm to sell stationery quadrupled my salary and then some, not to mention paying for building a warehouse on a very desirable piece of industrial estate freehold which I still own.
So, after a first in electrical, electronic and nuclear engineering and becoming a Chartered Engineer, I sold stationery for nearly 40 years because government has no idea how to reward talent.
When I look at government procurement now, I see that nothing has changed. It makes me feel sick just thinking about the waste.
Similar working for a 'dont talk about it's agency in the 90s.
Pay was based on civil service grade but they needed to hire the same CS people that the city was clamouring for.
So they all had to be promoted on arrival. The result was high level meetings with distinguished retired-colonel types who had spent 40years reaching the rank of 7th level Exculted Mage, and a dozen spotty 20 year olds who knew C++
Same in BT. When they created software engineering centres around the UK in the early 1980s they had to offer competitive salaries to those in private industry, so we new graduates got hired at the grade of "Assistant Executive Engineer" (AEE). The guys out in the field were royally pissed off, they started as Technical Assistants installing/fixing phones, and after 30-odd years and multiple promotions some could hope to get to AEE grade running a team of technicians just in time for retirement.
Nothing changed in the 90s. I had a degree with specialism in pharmacologyand genetics a real buzz area at that time with huges investments going on. Pay rates for grads were lower than checkout operators at Tesco. With the result that 90% of my degree class left science and stepped into IT jobs.
To my understanding it's still much the same now. The government loves to boast about getting kids into STEM subjects, but at the core these subjects have piss poor renumeration for a very difficult area.
government has no idea how to reward talent
The folk who go on about “we don’t build anything any more!” have a bit of a point. I’m current CS and huge amounts of our tech is locked into the usual large North American suppliers. With a few notable exceptions (e.g. ARM) a lot of technical innovation in the last 30-odd years has happened outside the UK.
It’d be great if we could realistically deploy onto a UK owned and run hyperscale cloud but such a thing doesn’t exist. And I can’t help but think that one reason it doesn’t exist is that government policies over the period haven’t prioritised rewarding innovation and talent.
I can't speak for the spooks (apt it's almost Halloween) but other departments are on the DDaT payscale which allows them to pay significantly more for certain skills if you can actually evidence them, usually bumping the 'gurus' above their own line managers base pay.
It's still somewhat below what you could get as johnny freelancer, but it does help bridge the gap a bit. Only downside is it isnt pensionable and is a target rate which CDDO never bloody change, so each year it gets eroded by your base pay increasing, increasing your pensionable earnings and therefore reducing your take home pay.
When I worked for a US Govt Dept, we had a similar - though less severe - pay differential between those inside the organization and in industry. It wasn't uncommon to have a civil servant supervising contractors making 2x their salary.
The only retention tools I had were a rather generous leave policy, decent health cover, and extremely generous educational benefits. By and large we could retain just enough skilled and dedicated people to get the job done.
Hopefully GCHQ has some truly extraordinary benefits, educational plan, and so forth.
Not a .gov story, but related to a US software company...
Similar to London salary weighting, the only way the company could attract people from the bigger (and sexier) Silicon Valley companies was with money. Sadly HR made the banding inflexible, so people had to be hired at senior levels to get a salary that could let the hiring manager compete with the likes of Adobe, Amazon, etc. New grads were getting hired in California as "Senior..." tech grades and poisoning the whole system in other locations (around the US and worldwide) with their lack of experience.
Back on topic though, governments the world over need to learn that they are not going to attract the best talent with their salaries. They might attract the ones that want to work for them, but that's not necessarily the best talent and is certainly not the right way to retain them long term.
Problem with many governments is that they see talent as a threat. It comes from the top where egos and agendas skew the priorities. Imagine hiring someone very smart and articulate who can challenge your vision with facts and logical arguments. Certain governments don't want that. They prefer to bend or hide the reality to support their goals rather than change the goals to be realistic.
How not to get the top talent, in the most demanding jobs, 101. Sexiness of the job aside, 40k to be working in London with London commute is atrocious.
If you have that level of ability you can easily command 60k in the private sector even working for a boring corporation. And with a few years experience in the bag probably quite a bit more as a contractor.
They have ridiculous job titles to sound impressive when they leave. I must admit an application from a " Lead Cyber Security Expert" at GCHQ would go on top of the interview pile.
My young colleagues tell me that "job cat fishing" (or is it phishing) is also a thing, where employers big up the role that does not reflect what you will be doing.
"Government pays crap wages" - hardly news, is it.
"generous public sector pension scheme" - but 25% of feck-all is srill 25% of feck-all. And to actually receive a full pension one has to stay there for how many decades, working for feck-all?
Put it this way
Option A. Work for peanuts for 37 years and retire on a "full" pension at 55. That "full" pension being 50% of final salary, lets assume £21k. Possible tax free laump sum depending on scheme. Wait 12 years to claim state pension.
Option B. Work for more money for 45 years, moving from job to job on increasing salaries, with a basic pension-matched schemes contributing 12-16% salary. Add AVCs as reuired. Retire from age 55 onwards with a pot(s) worth in excess of £50k/annum. Higher salary, higher pension on retirement, AND larger tax free lump sum.
Just FYI, tax free lump sums are now capped 25% or max £250k, whichever is the greater
I've been working on Option B for the last 35 years! People in my family think private sector IT work I do is average salaries, gonna enjoy giving them a huge shock when I throw my retirement bash at 56 in a couple of years time!
How would such a salary motivate to even wake up in the morning? It could be the result of bloated public sector, where limited tax revenue must be spread among many welfare-driven jobs "created". Or the system is rigged to indirectly support contractors.
To offer higher salaries a lot of jobs must be cut from the public sector. This would not be (democratically) popular. It is easier to increase taxes again.
Wealth evaporates the day workers stop working, as any communist country has proven multiple times. (That's why tax land, not labor.)
>How would such a salary motivate to even wake up in the morning?
You got a crap degree from a former amusement arcade and have no actual skills that a city firm would want and don't work hard enough for a startup.
You can hide in the buerocracy of a govt org that slowly promotes you for doing nothing, never fires anyone and offers a pension
Sadly true. Was at a boffin-rich govt lab as one of the crowd of Oxbridge/Imperial interns, but all the staff that hadn't been there since the war were the barely passed graduates in sports science from Loughborough
It was then privatised, run down and we buy the capability from the USA now.
Strangely they weren't paying the sort of salary to lure top Maths/Physics PhDs from aerospace, never mind the city.
I was on £42k as a cyber security manager in the public sector 5yr ago and quit because it was rediculously low for the industry, or for any professional role tbh. And they didn't pay qualified lawyers much more. This actually seems even more rediculous since even the councils have upped their game somewhat.
Wonder if we're missing something like a technology weighting or a bonus scheme that needs to be tacked on.
6 figures for a specialist isn't so common, most on that money are involved in sales or the boardroom as well. But for a senior cyber bod with certification and experience £60k would be rock bottom end looking up to £90k at least. And £110+ if your looking to them to do bid work too.
I guess it depends on what exactly GCHQ require their "cyber" people to be doing.
I doubt if its deploying your standard security toolset or running a SIEM/SOC or patching Windows servers or being able to quote PCI/ NIST frameworks to auditors from Deloittes - you know the typical cyber stuff that is the daily grind for most security professionals.
I'd imagine their entire focus was more offensive or cryptography.
More akin to working as security researchers for the types of orgs who hunt threats and look for new vulns - not something that banks in the city of London have much need for but more like the big boys in Google, Microsoft or Palo Alto etc play at. I'm not even sure if those orgs pay much to the guys and gals who do this sort of heavy technical lifting either, but I can't say I've ever seen one of those jobs advertised.
Maybe you are right. There is an excess of cyber graduates coming out now that can talk tech about an attack but couldn't do a thing about it when faced with a room of beancounters. I've always thought that information security was 90% psychology and 10% technology.
A grad that can pen test but not write a risk report or develop user polcies and standards to act as controls is no use to me. The tech skills I can buy in cheap when needed.
I've yet to meet any infosec people I'd trust to install a piece of AV software properly, let alone have even an ounce of securty knowledge above most quality admins. I know there must be some good infosec bods out there but all I've met so far from infosec are people who couldn't hack it as a proper Linux/Windows/DB admin job and so ended up doing infosec 'cos it was mostly just sitting around in meetings waving bits of paper with Rapid7 reports printed and moaning that no one take security seriously enough despite the constant rounds of patching admins do daily.
Apologies to the good infosec bods but you have a lot of cowboys in your part of the IT crowd, you really need to sort your image out! ha ha!!
>>>I'm not even sure if those orgs pay much to the guys and gals who do this sort of heavy technical lifting either, but I can't say I've ever seen one of those jobs advertised.<<<
A random search of Microsoft's career Web site. Senior threat researcher IC4 $117K to $229K, San Francisco area $153K to $250K. Level IC5 $137.6K to $267K, San Francisco $180K to $290K partial WFH, good medical benefits and discounted stock purchase, stock options and 401(k) partial matching.
I don't think it takes a genius to work out why paying staff significantly less than the market rate is a terrible idea when hiring someone for a leading position in your cyber security organisation.
First of all it makes it easy for foreign adversaries to get a foot in the door.
Second, even if you employ someone who isn't working for a foreign state it is going to be far too tempting to the person you employ to sell sensitive data to the criminal underworld because of the value of that data compared to the wages being paid by the government.
If you want the job done right then you have to be willing to pay for it.
I eagerly await the next massive UK cyber security breach, it'll give me a good chuckle for a few minutes knowing how incompetent they are not just at the task of digital security but also just hiring a suitable person to fulfil that task.
I feel sorry for those living in the United Kingdom, they're being protected by paper hat's and cardboard shields against a whole range of adversaries equipped with flamethrowers & petrol bombs.
If you live in the UK it may be worth contacting your local government representative and asking them to raise this as a SERIOUS issue before it's too late and they employ a weazel or a complete & utter idiot.
What is funny is that certain levels of HMG security clearance particularly look for whether the subject (or their family) is financially exposed.... ie being likely to take a bung from Moscow.
They look for debts but they don't look for the bleedin' obvious which is that they pay badly!
Eh? You eagerly await the next massive security breach? What are you talking about? It would serve us all better if you were worried about your issues in the land of the free. The US has an appalling record of cybersecurity failures, critically affecting many branches of government and revealing untold amounts of extremely sensitive personal and national security information. Take the 2020 breach as an example; it was bad, really, really bad, but unfortunately, I'm prevented from emphasising just how bad it was because much of it is classified. It's so bad that they won't even tell us how bad it was. That's freedom, y'all. Woo!
What's even worse is that US companies are responsible for much of the West's critical infrastructure (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, AWS, Uber, etc.). This means breaches could lead to serious and deadly global problems. Still, despite the security experts earning salaries in the millions, they fuck it up constantly. The fact that the US govt does not oversee this situation better is reckless and irresponsible. Worse still, no matter how badly they fuck up, the US govt just gives these firms more secret data to protect. Look at the amount of security fuck ups Microsoft has made that have led to catastrophic outcomes. Yet, the US govt (with all these wonderful salaries you imply US govt security jobs pay) keeps trusting them with more of its critical national security information. IT'S NUTS.
I work in this area in the UK, and at the risk of being impolite, you don't know what you're talking about. That said, like you, I feel sorry for those of us in the UK, but only because we must rely so much on US infrastructure, software, services, corporate governance structures and a substandard US government cybersecurity service that keeps making the same mistakes. Not to mention a guy who keeps nuclear records in his garage and tweets mission details whenever he fancies it.
However, unlike you, I will not and never would have a good chuckle when the US has another breach. Why the hell would I? Only a dickhead would want to do that.
A simple question for you, jgard, because you have real live practical virtual experience in this area in the UK ...... Is cyber security which prevents increasingly damaging leaks and exploitation of sensitive information and secret intelligence by foreign agents/hostile entities/Anons/unknown unknowns possible?
Here it is realised to be impossible, but a great invisible export earner nevertheless, which is surely crazy whilst being just a figment of primitive imagination for 0day use/abuse/misuse/attack against daydreamers wherever and whenever such a surreal reality is presented/pimped/pumped and dumped.
Looking at how things could shake out here in Burgerland, you think they'd hire one of us USians?
I'll...er...they'd work cheap just to GTFO if we get Trumped. They won't even care where they'd stick them. Anything is better than living through that again.
Surprises me to hear. I feel like a very small minority being left leaning in this part of the industry even in the UK. I hear a lot of not just right wing support, but even overt support of Trump!
Such a minority to the point where I suspect even posting AC on this one piece of information will mean people know who I am.
I think we in the UK don't understand that Trump is in fact really quite popular in the old USofA.
It may look implausible to us Eastpondians but then we just have to consider the degredation in quality of our own politicians. We're only a few political cycles away from having our own Trump (and Bojo was getting close anyway).
Prior to Trump being elected I had a friend that regularly worked in Huston, we were talking about the US election of that time when in the UK the idea of Trump beating Hillary seemed farcical and was rather fearfully telling me that I just didn't get how popular Trump actually was and that he might well win. I don't know if he had a bet on but he should have.
This post has been deleted by its author
So, I was once a contractor in said haunt of Alan Turing's ghost. I tell you, working in there is an absolute blast. Attack ships on fire off the belt of Orion doesn't begin to colour walking in Mr. Turing's footprints. You just need a little patience with the bureaucrats, is all. One of my gov employee colleagues had been a minor dot-com and contractor, but sold up and joined the place for the lulz. Then Crapita grabbed the contract so I retired early.
Since then the world has changed. gov.uk now recruits on a so strictly level playing field that you start out anonymous. Your CV must contain no hint of who, where or what you are, just why you can do the job. Even a dopey old seventy-something pensioner, firing on so few cylinders they are reduced to 3 days a week, stands as much chance as anybody else of getting that interview. And the official workplace ethic is equally laid back. There is even compulsory "Active Bystander" training, in which you learn how to safely intervene in workplace abuse - best training course I ever did. So yeah, now I am a Civil Servant working part-time at the old skills, and still having a blast - though not in GCHQ this time - and I even get a packet of peanuts to supplement my pension!
It's a weird world, o my masters.
And quickly getting considerably weirder with every effective unfolding 0day, AC.
Makes for an exceedingly rich-pickings playing field though, whenever one knows what one should be doing ..... and how to both master and do what needs to be done ..... and what others will do as a result of guaranteed future programmed events.
Was a civil servant in the late 90s / early 2000s.
Positives:
* Graduate training is very good.
* Retire at 60
* Very Very Very hard to sack to sack someone (usually move positions)
* Skills bonus makes you competitive-ish with private sector
Negatives:
* Every ~10 years, beancounters decide to do away with the skills bonus - so we mark time. Then, after ~5 years after that, management realise people are leaving in droves and not getting new recruits in. So skills bonus is brought in again.
* Rubbish pay
* Hard to change jobs as a specialist
* Very Very Very hard to sack to sack someone (usually move positions)
Ho hum.
I was looking on their website recently interested in a change of career (already in Defence/Software) but the salaries offered are embarrassing.
They also weren't the 'proper jobs', not sure if these exist in the UK or if we a completely reliant on the US for the clever stuff.
Without an internal referee I'm not sure an unsolicited CV even with details of current credentials would open the hidden doors!
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