Crikey, there's a huge cost of living difference between Darlington, London, or Manchester...
GCHQ dangles up to £130K for a CISO to fight the world's most capable adversaries
GCHQ is looking to recruit a chief information security officer (CISO), a job it describes as "one of the most influential cybersecurity leadership roles in the UK," at a salary of £96,981 to £130,000. According to the security agency's recruitment ad, the job involves protecting the UK against "the most capable and persistent …
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Thursday 26th February 2026 14:25 GMT elsergiovolador
I see a downvote.
To reach that level you invest decades into yourself. Constant learning. Constant experimentation. Staying ahead in a field that punishes complacency immediately. It's an enormous personal investment.
£6,723 a month after tax in 2026, in the UK, for someone carrying national security risk, is effectively: we’ll keep you sheltered and well fed, but we’re not paying for the lifetime of human capital you built. We’re pricing you as a salaried input, not as the value you safeguard and add.
Benchmarking that against the median wage is the trick. It reframes a strategic security role as “you’re already lucky”.
It’s how you normalise extracting high-end labour at cost while upside and leverage sit elsewhere.
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Thursday 26th February 2026 21:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
It reframes a strategic security role as “you’re already lucky”.
Maybe it does, but YOU were the person who a couple of days ago was whingeing pitifully in this forum that civil servants sat on their arses, do nothing and got "golden pensions" in return. Now you're complaining that the civil service doesn't pay enough.
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Friday 27th February 2026 06:21 GMT Anonymous Coward
One reason you might be seeing downvotes is your exaggeration of the meaning of the number. It's likely this isn't enough to attract the skills they need, as others have said before you. But you don't stop at that. You phrase a £130k salary as "Okay money if you are in your 20s, living in a flat share or with parents.", even though we all know there are people who earn less than that as older adults with better housing than that.
Your statement reminds me of a colleague of mine who complained frequently about his low salary. Had he simply said that he could and should be paid more for his skills, he would probably be right as people had left the company for pay raises elsewhere, but he made a very similar complaint about how bad his housing situation was. All I could think in response was "You earn more money than I do, I've got better housing than many people of the same age I know, and I have less problem paying for it". His housing was certainly expensive, but it was also larger, in a nicer location, and with nicer contents than anything he was comparing it to. You could make valid points that someone deserves more than what they're getting, that they could get more if they did something, that there is a plan for why they're not being offered more, but when you make the argument that a specific amount of money buys less than we know it does, all your opinions get sorted below the incorrect factual statement you're using to defend them. To anyone who has earned or is earning less than that, and there are a lot of them, that statement suggests you understand neither the value of money nor what it's like not to have things, and if you don't understand either of those values, why should they take your opinions on the value of someone with security experience as being any more accurate?
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Thursday 26th February 2026 12:26 GMT VoiceOfTruth
I can offer some help here
>> protecting the UK
1. Rip and replace all Cisco equipment. It is full of backdoors and security bypasses.
2. Do not use MS, Google, Anthropic, etc. This is giving the American regime access to data which should be considered national security.
>> deep understanding of cloud security
3. You mean cloud insecurity. Don't use it.
None of my recommendations would be accepted. This is a box ticking job for a low grade techie who talks the talk.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
