Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) sought a lead cyber security expert and advertised annual pay of £41,935
That’s fucking shocking. And after they can’t fill that role they’ll bring in a contractor and pay 4 times as much.
The German equivalent did the same. The list of requirements was as long as an arm or two. from memory: The person should be a team leader with 10+ years of experience, know Windows, MacOS and Linux, networking, security, hacking, etc, pp, and have knowledge of the legal issues regarding this stuff on top of the technical knowledge to boot.
They offered ~€2500/month. Some guy with a company in that business said that he would rent out someone with that level of knowledge (minus the legal stuff) for more than that per day.
They pulled the ad after a few months.
A part of me thinks it’s low on purpose so the only candidates that apply are doing it for ideological reasons, and aren’t motivated by money (thus opening them up to risk of being bought by a foreign agency). Who knows, maybe it would be revealed their salary would quadruple after they get the job.
But the likelihood is that their budgets are low and can’t compete with the private sector.
People on low salaries are exactly the sort of people who would be vulnerable to being bribed by foreign adversaries.
Yeah I realise that, that’s why I thought about maybe the advertised salary might not necessarily be the truth and they do get decent compensation to reduce the chance of them getting compromised due to financial reasons.
Only 4x? Not sure what UK rates are like, but it could easily be 10x that in the US.
The US does pay significantly higher, but with enormous costs (afaik).
My senior full stack engineer position would be about 60k/year at the government, which is a significant income to Dutch standaards.
My monthly costs are around 1400 per month, the rest used for savings and fun.
