UK must pay cyber pros more than its Prime Minister, top civil servant says Senior officials in the UK's civil service understand that future cyber hires in Whitehall will need to be paid a salary higher than that of the Prime Minister if the government wants to get serious about fending off attacks. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Wanted. Top infosec pros willing to defend Britain on …
Years ago an engineer who worked for me went for an interview at a government place which he wasn't at liberty to reveal any more details about. They loved him but when they found out what he was earning they told him they couldn't afford to take him on. The job he was going for had a fixed civil-service grade and pay that couldn't be changed and it was dead-men's shoes all the way up. The interviewer admitted that the only selling point he had was that people were virtually unsackable and the pension was fantastic. Unsurprisingly the guy didn't take the job.
"the pension was fantastic"
Unless things have changed since my time that's true - its excellence would be a fantasy.
The way it worked is that it was contribution free but salary levels were set on that basis - what you would have been paid less the deductions that would have been taken.
It was a final salary scheme so, because the salary was lower than it would have been with a conributary scheme, the pension was also lower than it would have been if it were contributary.
A year's service accumulated 1/80th of final salary so someone joining from university at 21 and retiring at 60 would be a year's worth short of retiring on half pay. When I left I joined a pension scheme that accumulated 1/60th sp the equivalent 21 to 60 would be a year's worth of retiring on 2/3 pay with, of course, the pay at the level of a contributory scheme.
I think a few people in the service might be looking at pensions and thinking that at least they were index linked so would keep up with inflation which salaries were very often not: when HMG wished to save money or wanted pay restraint all round - which was a lot of the time - the only place they could really achieve such ends was by holding back on Civil Service pay settlements and not providing the promised promotions.
Many many years back I worked for the MOD for a few years. Some time after I left I was surprised to receive a cheque for the refund of my non-contributory pension payments. It was very welcome, particularly as I did not know that non-contributory pension contributions could be "refunded". The concept still bemuses me.
A few weeks later another cheque arrived. This one was for a grade related pay increase that was backdated to April in the year I left.
The icing on the cake came a week or so later when I received yet another cheque. This one was for the refund of the non contributory pension that applied to the back dated pay increase.
I've had the reverse, a candidate who couldn't talk about any of their achievements, projects or responsibilities etc because of the nature of their prior employment but they came with an excellent reference which, if you took a cynical stance, boiled down to "hire this guy, he's incredible, trust me bro"
Hardly anyone can afford to pay techies what they're worth...it's why none of us are as motivated as we should be. Working in tech is massively high pressure at times, isolating and requires enormous effort to stay current...it's not a job you train for once and then do it forever like plumbing or carpentry...it's a job that constantly shifts and changes...
I once had someone say to me "being a techie, it's a bit like a trade innit?" to which I responded..."not really, it's more like being a dentist on an Arctic fishing vessel and if you fall in the water you can't expect the sweet release of death to free you from the anguish".
I've always said that you don't pay techies for what they do, because the better a techie is, the more they can do in a short period of time, you pay them to be available...they need to be treated more like athletes than office workers...you want them to be in peak condition at all times and when they aren't running about giving you everything, you make sure they're well rested so they can do it again.
Just like people in the finance sector are paid sufficiently to ensure they never go into debt and reflect badly on the business, techies should be paid sufficiently to ensure that when the shit isn't hitting the fan, they're in the most relaxed and calm state possible so they can think clearly and act swiftly when you need them to.
Over my career I've been treated like shit on several occasions...not intentionally I might add, there was no malice...I think...the people I worked for just didn't understand how much pressure I'd been under for a period of time and the average joe schmoe assumes that because you're good at tech it must be easy...the worst experience for me is when I got drafted in to recover from a ransomware situation...there were backups and all that good stuff, so it wasn't stressful in the "everything is lost" regard...but I was flying solo and had to essentially rebuild the entire infrastructure from the ground up and spend a solid week recovering data, 3 days of which were spent in a datacentre...I had to sleep in the datacentre because I couldn't risk leaving in case something went wrong with the recovery and I had to start again...each time I had restart a job, if I went home, it was essentially another day lost...so I just stayed at the DC...spending a couple of hours in a DC is bad enough, 3 days would break most people...I was pretty close. Anyway, I finished on the Wednesday evening, everything was up and running again, tickety boo...so I gave myself the rest of the week off to catch a break from it all...Thursday morning I had someone on the phone raging at me to get to the fucking office..."Where the fuck are you? Everything is working again, but we need you here just in case"..."I just said to them, if you want me in the next two days, after 8 solid days bringing your shit show back from the brink of death, I want an extra £20k before I leave because it would have cost you at least £50k to get an external firm in to do what I did, pay up or piss off, I'll see you on Monday"...then I hung up the phone. I arrived on the Monday (at 11am) and it was as if nothing had happened, nobody tackled me, nobody collared me for being late, this particular person was very apologetic and explained to me that the conversation we had was actually a conference call with several execs on the line and they shat themselves when I put things into perspective and demanded money...I had a meeting with them the next day and they'd actually gone and got quotes to find out just how much it would have cost them had I not pulled off what I pulled off...turns out I was wrong about the £50k it would have been closer to £100k. There was a lot of handshaking and back patting before I left and they handed me a £200 Amazon voucher...then my annual review came round, I asked for a pay rise (since I was only on £21k at the time, £3k less than the receptionist) citing that I had essentially stopped the company going bust. They gave me nothing. I resigned a month later.
"The interviewer admitted that the only selling point he had was that people were virtually unsackable and the pension was fantastic."
That's mainly the case. There can also be tremendous benefits as government offices get every single holiday off no matter how minor. If you have a family with health issues, the insurance can be pure Platinum.
This will always be a problem in the civil service where salary is dependent on grade which is often dependent simply on time served** without messing up. In the real world you pay what things are worth. I've was a line manager and project manager in electronic engineering in the UK for 20 years and in every one of those years I had people working for me who earned a lot more than me and it never bothered me at all. My success, pay and bonus were all dependent on how good my team were and some of them were bloody good and got paid accordingly.
**perhaps with some flexibility based on which school you went to.
Salaries are low in the UK across all of IT though. The difference with the US is pretty noticeable.
I suppose the US-UK differential for IT roles is perhaps greater than other sectors, but you're also not putting the first $nnn/mo into your health insurance and a rainy day fund for immediate care whilst you argue with your insurance about whether you're covered or not.
Salaries are much higher in the US, but living in the US comes with some pretty substantial monthly outgoings that we don't have to worry about. Combine that with lower job security (even if you're not in an at-will state) - albeit British business has done it's best to import the worst of US employment practices via zero-hour and agency/contract conditions that can functionally nullify niceties like redundancy consultations and notice periods. Actually employing staff is such a 1960s concept - it's no wonder the Civil Service are one of the last bastions to actually do it!
They always have been...at least in my 25+ years of experience in the industry. It's because of the backwards way that investment works in the UK I think...we still have the same mentality as the industrial revolution days...investment capital has to be used on fixed assets...not people.
If you ask for £1m to buy buildings, equipment, machinery etc because if the shit hits the fan, that stuff can be sold to recoup some of the investment...you'll get it all day long. If you ask for £1m to hire a team of people, you'll get a lot of umming and aaring.
UK investment is all about the balance sheet, US investing is all about hoarding manpower so that nobody else can have it. See thing is, in a place the size of the US...it doesn't matter if you own a building, the country is so massive, that erecting a new building is relatively trivial and means that a building on a balance sheet means very little. However, having 1,000 people on your payroll that nobody else can have...that's valuable...it's why so many people that end up working in FAANG roles end up doing basically nothing...for years...because they weren't hired to do anything. They were hired to make sure they don't go elsewhere.
Mate of mine went to go and work for Google...the interview process was lengthy, gruelling and he was convinced he was going to end up working on something exciting...the first week he had no idea what he was supposed to be doing...and when he spoke to a manager, he was told that the expectation was that he'd find his own team to join, or to assemble a team to work on a new project that he'd have to pitch in order to get signed off and funded...this probably works really well if you have a lot of staff that have a lot of initiative...but most folks don't so they end up drifting around.
He eventually got fed up at Google and decided to move to Facebook...where much to his chagrin it was exactly the same...he ended up leaving the tech industry and now works in retail selling buggies in John Lewis.
There are plenty in the UK but nobody understands how to find them and hire them.
I'm a certified cybersecurity analyst and Ive had a keen interest in ha...cybersecurity since I was a youngun in the 90s.
A lot of the job specs Ive seen for cybersecurity stuff are pure fantasy and a lot of the people Ive met that work in these positions are useless.
You teach people how to detect attacks by grepping logs all you like...but teaching someone to think like a hacker not so much.
If you want to protect yourself against people throwing bricks at your greenhouse you need to hire someone that has experience throwing bricks at greenhouses because he'll tell you how to build a fucking hard greenhouse...and he can test it. You don't hire someone thats read a lot about greenhouses and bricks and the theory behind launching a brick at a greenhouse. They will identify that a brick has been thrown at your messed up greenhouse but they won't be able to stop future bricks being thrown and they will build the greenhouse back the same as it was, but through a different vendor with a different sales pitch.
"where salary is dependent on grade which is often dependent simply on time served without messing up......perhaps with some flexibility based on which school you went to."
Speaking as a civil servant, this was the case in decades long gone, yes. Now, however, most of the public school Whitehall mandarins are long, long gone, and lost to organisational memory. Most of the current Directors General and Permanent Secretaries will be a lot younger than you may expect, with more varied backgrounds. There do remain some fast-tracks to promotion to these levels, such as serving in a "special advisor" capacity and other political lickspittle roles, but old school tie, pretty much nope.
However, "not messing up" has never been a bar to promotion. Part of that's cultural to the CS, part of it is organisational in the form of a desperate lack of organisational strategy, a similar lack of proper organisational objectives, and a subsequent absence of clear, specific personal objectives. In turn that leads to a culture of acceptance of failure on a "not my fault" basis. Sometimes it isn't senior civil servant's fault - look at the debacle of NHS/PFI under NuLabour, Brexit and Northern Ireland, or the huge damage caused by a mere weekend of Trussonomics, all of which were examples of messes gifted to the nation by incompetent politicians. On the other hand, there's many things senior civil servants should be on the hook for, such as defence procurement, failed IT projects, or inept regulation (eg Ofgem, Ofwat, Ofcom). Bear in mind that if civil servants are to be accountable for their performance, then that means they should call out poor choices (or lack of choices) by politicians, and that's another contributor to the problem - the cabinet will have to be cautious holding civil servants to account, because said civil servants might point the finger (and have the evidence) at politicians. As always, politicians want power, but don't want to be held to account themselves.
Expect an announcement of sweeping changes tomorrow, widely pre-announced in the Graun. But as usual, government will focus on cutting the cost of administration, rather than improving effectiveness. Yet it's effectiveness that is the sole problem - the cost of the civil service is about 1% of total government spending. That compares to around 4-7% for the cost of administration of even well run very large businesses. The same is true with the NHS - public and political perception is that there's too many managers, yet the real problem is that there's too few (and somewhat too many idiots in senior management roles).
I would expect that -- 'not messing up' equals doing OK, and as far as I know that's not a bar to promotion in most places.
Yeah, certainly in IT, "not messing up" means you have successfully navigated all the possible ways you could have messed up and avoided them. If you're in project management/delivery, then you probably need to be showing some deliverables. But for IT and infrastructure, remaining successfully invisible and being part of the furniture generally means you're doing a good job!
"But for IT and infrastructure, remaining successfully invisible and being part of the furniture generally means you're doing a good job!"
Absolutely, shame HR and management doesn't see it that way.
If you're lucky enough to not be dismissed because of lack of understanding here, you will be forced into deploying systems that are designed to monitor you and highlight that you might not be doing much..."We need more visibility into the IT situation".
No you don't, just leave it alone. If it's running smoothly, it doesn't matter if your techie appears to be flitting around the office like a deranged butterfly with no sense of direction...leave him alone.
He isn't doing literally nothing, he's doing everything in his power to ensure that he is always available for when he's actually needed.
"But for IT and infrastructure, remaining successfully invisible and being part of the furniture generally means you're doing a good job!"
In many places you never get noticed for doing a good job. That's just expected. You Will be noticed if something bad happens. I had a job where after a period of time I had a review where they dissected my time card and added up the minutes I was late back from lunch or late in the morning. No mention was made of time I was in early, times the boss was late opening up first thing and the time I worked late. Amortized over the period, it was around 2 minutes late at each point. Since everybody was on the same schedule and there was only one time clock, a minute or two might just be where you wound up in line. They didn't pay me for any of that time I was off the clock. It was a repair shop and I very quickly became the lead tech on many of the products that they serviced. That didn't seem to count. My throughput was about average amongst the group even though I did a lot of supporting other techs. That didn't seem to count. I went to another shop and they tried to bully that company by saying I wasn't allowed to work for them due to a (illegal) non-compete clause. They were told to pound sand and that was the end of that. I guess I left a hole when I chose to not work for them anymore.
"Speaking as a civil servant, this was the case in decades long gone, yes."
But is the primacy of the general service grades also long gone? The assumption that a chap with no particular qualifications for any particular job, being equally (un)suited to all of them could do any of them while someone with specific knowledge is in flexible in terms of what they could do and therefore deserves less. And the assumption that "responsibility" lies only in the number of direct reports and not on the significance of what one does personally.
"the civil service where salary is dependent on grade which is often dependent simply on time served"
ROFLMAO. Grades increasing with time served?
No way. You could be left stranded on top of a grade scale and watch inflation eating away at the value for years. When I handed in my notice I was offered the promotion I should have been at least considered for at least a couple of years previously if not more. No board, none of the usual procedures, here's the promotion we've been holding back on if you stay. OK, they didn't mention the holding back bit and denied it in response to my letter of refusal but that's what it amounted to. If the previous director had still been in post I might have tried negotiating back-dating without actually committing to rescinding my notice in case it might have worked but I reckoned it wasn't worth the effort as things were.
It was a long time ago but I recall salary within a grade stepped up year by year but there was a limit (perhaps 5) to the number of salary steps in the grade. Grade increases were tough with a ceiling on the maximum grade that some people could attain within their path. I remember having a beer with one chap in his early 30's celebrating reaching the highest grade possible for his civil service career path. It was more of a wake as his career could go no further.
Some fast track career paths did have automatic promotion up to a certain level and there were even very very rare ones that could skip a grade.
It was a long time ago but I recall salary within a grade stepped up year by year but there was a limit (perhaps 5) to the number of salary steps in the grade.
Doing away with grade steps was one of Osborne's galaxy brain ideas in 2010 to control civil service pay.
Ministers were all getting very narked by 2014 that civil servants "were treating it like a funfair, having a go at this, then at that" and moving around a lot. Shocker, if the only way to get a pay increase is to move roles, people will start doing that, instead of staying in a role for 3-4 years getting their increments (and becoming better at their job as time goes on, which is the entire point of increments - at least for the first 2-3 years. You're going to be much more productive in year 2 than year 1 when you're still getting your feet under the desk.
"You're going to be much more productive in year 2 than year 1 when you're still getting your feet under the desk"
Unless you're a job tart and bouncing around before people find out you're useless is the point.
It's very common in the US to hang around in a role for two years then leave for a promotion. It's a merry go round of maximising your pay increases and promotions while minimising your actual output and responsibility.
I worked at a US firm for a number of years and this was common place. You'd have someone start as an intern for 6 months, move on to somewhere else into a paid role with some kind of title, they would then hang around there for upto 2 years, leave again for a promotion and end up back at the company they started at, no better than they were an intern but with a much higher pay packet and loftier title. It's why US firms have tons of "veeps".
This is why I think Britain has the greatest work ethic in the world, because when we can't be arsed we're honest about it and when we're working we're working. Everyone I've met from places like Australia, South Africa, the US etc etc...they focus massively on being present and looking extremely busy, but when you scratch the surface you realise there is no substance because these places don't measure productivity, just hours worked etc..."I put in 80 hours last week, knackered"...presumably it's because these places never really had a proper "industrial" era. They skipped over it...because here in the UK, back in the industrial era if you turned up at the pub and tried to pass off "12 hours down't pit the day, it were busy it were" as being the same "Humped 2 ton today wi'out pony as it were sent ter knackers yard, knocked off early cuz there were nowt left to shift" you'd be laughed at because one of those statements quantifies the output, a situation that needed to be overcome and the outcome and might be impressive (he moved a lot of material, despite his horse being fucked and ran out of shit to shift, so he finished for the day...i.e. he was productive), one of them is just a measure of time (they just spent 12 hours somewhere) that means literally nothing i.e. you have no idea how productive they were...could have sat around reading the paper all day.
My grandad (who was a Yorkshire miner, yeah I know, *I know!*) always used to say "Any daft fucker can be busy, if I wanted to be busy, I'd unpack and re-organise bloody kitchen cupboards over and over again, now stop being busy you daft bastard and get the bloody job done, whats wrong with yer?".
I was 8 the first time he said that to me, I was raking leaves off his lawn...miserable old bastard...I looked round at my Dad after he said that and my old nodded and said "He's right you know". He was rarely wrong to be fair...he couldn't stand people fucking around...it was abhorrent to him, like you'd shit in his coffee or something.
"No way. You could be left stranded on top of a grade scale and watch inflation eating away at the value for years."
It happens a lot and many times the person will shift sideways to another role that still has room to move up. It's a great way to make sure you always lose your most experienced people.
Many government jobs have a hiring preference for people already working a government job which makes moving sideways while keeping accumulated benefits in place.
Humphrey:
But the whole idea is... it it it it it... It's... It strikes at the very roots of... It's the beginning of the end! The thin end of the wedge! A Bennite solution! Where will it end? The abolition of the monarchy?
Hacker:
Don't be absurd, Humphrey.
Humphrey:
There is no reason to change the system which has worked so well in the past.
Hacker:
But it hasn't.
Humphrey:
But we've got to give the present system a fair trial.
>Also I suspect he doesn't get the inflation proof pension based on salary as if paid for 40+ years that M Thatcher created.
Without wanting to defend her, the former Prime Ministers expense allowance was created by Major after she left office - because she didn't actually have much money and would have been struggling financially as a result. Unfortunately, we now have 8-9 ex-Prime Ministers who are now able to claim £100k+ per year in expenses - one of them for less than 50 days.
A dedicated Teamsters Union worker was attending a convention in Las Vegas and, as you would expect, decided to check out the local brothels nearby. When he got to the first one, he asked the Madam, "Is this a union house?"
"No," she replied, "I'm sorry it isn't."
"Well, if I pay you $100.00, what cut do the girls get?"
"The house gets $80.00 and the girls get $20.00."
Mightily offended at such unfair dealings, the man stomped off down the street in search of a more equitable, hopefully unionized shop. His search continued until finally he reached a brothel where the Madam responded, "Why yes sir, this IS a Union House."
The man asked, "And if I pay you $100.00, what cut do the girls get?"
"The girls get $80.00 and the house gets $20."
"That's more like it!!!" the UAW man said. He handed the Madam $100.00, looked around the room and pointed to a stunningly attractive blonde. I'd like her for the night."
"I'm sure you would, sir," said the Madam, then gesturing to an 85 year old woman in the corner, "but Ethel here has Seniority."
> paid a salary higher than that of the Prime Minister
Specialists get paid a lot because they offer value for money. Employing one (if you can recognise a good one) is cheaper than a "do it yourself" solution.
Politicians are motivated by different rewards than cash. Any half decent Prime Minister could earn far more, if / when they wanted to, in private industry,
A Kings Counsel barrister (e.g. Starmer) can easily earn £1mn a year. Compared to the one-sixth of that paid to the P.M.
"Specialists get paid a lot because they offer value for money. "
An IT person is going to have more skill and expertise than pretty much any politician and should be paid more. The IT person also doesn't get a free pass to do a bit of insider trading like the elected get to do.
If the government has a department liaising between the councils erp department and knows sap,oracle etc.
That would prevent overly ambitious (ok crazy) plans. Keep oracle/sap salespeople honest.
They don't have to do the detail work but offer advice.
At one semiconductor company I worked for... a layout engineer got paid more than the ceo.
The government will fix the pay issue by increasing their own pay so that it remains higher than whatever they have to pay cyber talent.
Once W10 is officially EOL'd, the number of legacy systems will be easy to establish. It will be all of them.
The problem is that the latest tech, with AI, back doors etc, is inherently less secure and reliable than the legacy stuff was.
"The problem is that the latest tech, with AI, back doors etc, is inherently less secure and reliable than the legacy stuff was."
The legacy stuff has been compromised and patched a whole bunch of times to the point where it's very difficult to compromise as it was in the beginning. W11 comes out and the game is reset to zero.
Another version:
The legacy system is the one that enables the business to run itself to make the money to pay you to write some flashy graphical system that will generate reports to go into a spreadsheet to go into powerpoints for all the senior manglement to show each other how good a job they're doing. The senior manglement are also being paid by the money the legacy system makes.
The public sector is often publicly ripped-off by the big c***sultancies on projects that ought to be helping people. Just maybe, if the government had a team of people who actually understand big IT stuff and could call out these companies on their bullshit then that might help.
Here's one bit of free advice: before you spend billions on a system that does $stuff, maybe consider spending a much smaller sum on trialling and testing what $stuff should be. After all, what is the point in developing something that works "at scale" when it doesn't do anything useful
I think the recommendation here is to address exactly this.
I've been saying for years now that we need to in-source a lot of government IT function and that simply won't be possible unless they're in a position to pay their staff a commensurate salary with the private sector.
"I've been saying for years now that we need to in-source a lot of government IT function and that simply won't be possible unless they're in a position to pay their staff a commensurate salary with the private sector."
Government has to get much more clever. Instead of trying to do a big project in one go, a small team of well compensated people get something working on a small scale where problems can be backed out much more simply and quickly. Once everything is worked out, less expensive staff can deploy the system on a bigger scale. I'm a fan of modularity rather than just running everything through Mike and hoping he's honest.
they'll only leave.""
Smart managers have known for decades that normal people are at least equally as motivated by travel times, flexibility in holiday and time off etc as just the cash.
Consider where else in the UK could you be responsible for protecting the security of a whole countries benefits/health/education/borders/security ?
For some that is a daunting prospect.
For others it is the ultimate challenge.
Let's be honest, there will always be a shortage of competent IT professionals who understand the underlying key elements of systems and recognise when a system offers a genuine unique set of benefits and when it's yet another we're-very-well-known-and-do-everything* package
*But mostly not very well because outside what we were built for (probably mfg) we tried to integrate in by buying a specialist supplier in that area or bodged up because our staff didn't really understand the features that made specialist packages excel in their product space.
There is a shortage of talented people in government, in all sorts of domains. A reason for this might have something to do with education policies of various governments down the ages that has deemphasised topics such as engineering, science (you know, the hard ones that are difficult to get qualifications in), and created whole branches of school and higher education pathways that really shouldn't exist and sold those to students under the banner "here's a valuable, job-rich higher educational experience, your's for only £100k debt".
Now I'm not about to dis marketing and the need for business to be savvy when it comes to media, social networks, etc, but if as a government you put education in this sort of line on the same pedastal as topics that are far, far harder (such as engineering and science), one should not be surprised if one ends up with a glut of media studies graduates and a big shortage of engineers and people who truly, deeply understand their shit.
And if you've gone and done that, and then pay peanuts in your own governmental departments, guess what's not going to happen?
Missing The Point
Good though it is to see such topics being realistically commented on in the PAC for one narrow area of expertise, it's clear from the performance of all government that there is a terrible shortage of talent in all areas. MoD procurement is obviously very heavily dependent on many engineering disciplines, yet it's fairly clear that there's little engineering control in the process. It looks like there's a lot of "process", "barriers", and "politics" involved, and so there's obviously a lot of managers, accountants, and politicians getting in the way. The way to procure anything remotely technological is to put an (singular) engineer in charge of a programme, with the money at their sole discretion, and let them get on with it.
The historical precedents for this lie partly in WW2 - when shit got done urgently in part because Churchill understood who it was who knew their shit (engineers and scientists) and who it was did not (everyone else) - and partly in Lockheed Skunk Works - where back in the day the US gov backed off and let Kelly Johnson and his crew go about solving requirements pretty much as they saw fit, unfettered by the norms.
The lack of engineering talent in government is clearly dire; all those procurements for the NHS, MoD, police, councils, the lot; they all go wrong because someone other than an engineer is in charge, I'm sure. And there aren't engineers in charge, probably because there's barely any understanding in government of what engineering is and why it has to be done properly.
So, whilst sorting out Cyber expertise is no doubt important, it's not going to count for two toffees unless there's a swing within government to being engineering lead. And as that's likely to have to be "UK citizens", they're going to have to grow some more. And unless government is going to start up its own educational centres (like the big engineering firms such as RR have had to do to ensure they get talented people), the politicians are going to have to get properly rigorous with education policies. It's long been evident that the educational theorists who run education, set curricula, etc. have zero expertise in what a successful economy needs by way of talent in the modern era. They're going to have to be told what to deliver, and to start delivering it.
Effectively, they're going to have to move away from what so far has laughably been called "the knowledge economy" (which always sounded good, until you looked at what sort of knowledge that involves...). Just pushing up salaries for a very narrow field in order to grow it within gov - important though that may be - is not the whole answer. In fact I can imagine it would be the worse answer; anyone left in gov who actually does do complex engineering, project management, etc is more likely to be more disgusted than they already and leave... Understanding why the pool of available talent is so small in the first place is a big part of the answer.
And until the politicians grasp that, one suspects that it'll be business as usual.
-- when shit got done urgently --
You missed out a vital role - the Progress Chaser. These were and are the people that make sure things have happened and if they haven't push to make it happen. I know it should be the Project Manager making things happen but he/she's to busy producing pretty progress charts and graphs.
Ah, in my organisation that would be the technical lead. - Project manager works out schedules, man hours, keeping top management informed, sorting out biscuits and tea/coffee for meetings and other useful stuff. Technical lead makes keeps track of progress in detail and isn't afraid of having long technical discussions to decide direction and where people should be focusing their effort.
And a problem with no currently available solution also recognised, with missing talents and systemic hurdles and blockages accurately enough identified, by the US Department of Defense ...... https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2025/3/7/bolstering-defense-tech-cybersecurity-from-the-start ........ and most probably also by any or even all of their official and unofficial adversary and competition ..... legitimate peer global opposition?
Or is that troublesome step and quantum communications leap not yet realised in established mainstream intelligent news circles as possible and whenever at rest just lying in wait to pounce and wreak interminable havoc with intentional worthy consequences if ever badly denied as a fact which fiction cannot address to hide and keep secret.
Grasp that and business is certain to be extremely unusual and the future of politicians in business increasingly uncertain and most likely, extremely unlikely.
..... to think, and also both dangerous and terrifying and self-destructive to even imagine that anyone sane and smart would choose to work for any form of fundamentally incompetent and glaringly impotent government within systems which are clearly corrupted and inefficient and increasingly recognised as being solely designed to retain and maintain its failed leading drivers ........ and which be catastrophically vulnerable to random spontaneous attack by A.N.Others able to anonymously phish and remotely exploit vital systemic and critical endemic weaknesses which easily crash and burn, crush and destroy such programming in global projects ..... whenever fortunes are available to ensure such systems are not protected and presented with any form of indetectable future defence and intangible virtual assistance.
Defending the indefensible and despicable is a right insane mug's game with zero chance of success in any present and futures entertaining novel and noble intelligence as the building blocks for almighty constructive and creative virtual renderings for practical human colonisation and metadatabase physical population ‽ .
Interesting, if you pay 'peanuts' etc.
People don't seem to understand that cybersecurity isn't just something you can put in a '40 hour week' on.
Some work 70-120 hours when the SHTF, potentially more to get systems back up, the pressure on its own
can be a deal breaker and many folks burn out in short order.
In many cases folks in these sorts of positions care less about the money than making doubly sure that the
heart hospital doesn't get hacked for the 2nd time in a year because some bean counter ignored their warnings
and didn't fix the glaring security holes that allowed the scumbaggery in last time. Or worse 'fixed' it themselves
without consulting the experts and made things worse eg by replacing just the drives without addressing the cause.
It is also a matter of experience that sometimes the 'Black Swan' people didn't see coming is often an obscure
thing like malware hidden inside replacement parts- I myself have dodged a bullet with this.
Checking each and every component that gets installed is time consuming but when the outcome is cataclysmic..
Unbelievably up until very recently it was possible to hide malicious code in external HDMI to VGA adaptors.
AC
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