[PaulRobinson]

I say this as somebody who has worked vendor side in UK public sector for a number of years.

It's policy. It's official Whitehall policy.

As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow. But you can pay a "Systems Integrator" - a consultancy like Cap Gemini, Deloitte, Fujitsu - £600/day for the same programmer in the same seat. So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.

Then we get into actually building and owning tech. Look at the history of GDS - they were empowered to pay half decent salaries and build and own things, but then had budgets slashed and programs cut. Why? Because we can "just buy it". Yes, you won't own the IP, it'll cost 4x as much, it'll take 3x-5x longer, but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage.

This all started in the 1980s, and there are signs of it swinging back. I was at one department last year where they were telling me they're thinking about hiring actual engineers and embedding some devops stuff internally - absolutely jaw-droopingly revolutionary. Genuinely.

[pjc50]

> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.

Ding ding ding. This is all driven by ideological mistrust of the public sector, as you've pointed out and people are even defending in the comments.

[rayiner]

It’s not “ideological mistrust of the public sector.” It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.

FDR, who can hardly be accused of distrusting the public sector, emphasized the importance of public control over government sector salaries: https://www.fdrlibrary.org/unions

[datsci_est_2015]

Consultancies don’t appear to be subject to market forces either, judging by their complete dearth of talent and expertise.

In other words, “rent seeking”.

The only protection against pilfering of the public coffers appears to be strong cultural opposition to it, so exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the US, for example.

[convolvatron]

this is absolutely true. I can spin up a government consultancy and get inside the system so that I can low bid contracts, get extensions and not provide any meaningful service at all, that's a comfortable parasitic life. I worked in the US Dod and there was no meaningful quality difference between the 2x salary contractors with their additional 2x overhead than the lifers.

we can bemoan that the government isn't being efficient, but involving people with even less oversight whose only goal is to extract as much from the public coffer as possible is not a magic bullet that gets the public more for their money.

[Henchman21]

People in the US are told what to think by their phones. They're being told to view theft of public everything as a good.

It is insanity to watch.

[forlorn_mammoth]

> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls,

has the inbuilt assumption that 'market forces' are the only appropriate form of external control.

which is homeomorphic to "ideological mistrust of the public sector".

[rayiner]

Market forces aren’t the only appropriate form of external control. That’s why we have pay scales for government workers legislated by Congress. But OP said that’s driven by ideological mistrust of the government too.

And your second point is wrong too. See Scandinavia for places that both have a deep trust in the public sector and also deeply believe in markets and market forces.

[lesuorac]

> It’s that government jobs aren’t subject to market forces so you need some sort of external controls, like pay scales.

They are subject to the same market forces though. It's this exact thing that's killing government competency; the pay scales are set lower for a role in the government than at other corporations so qualified candidates do not apply to the government.

Ex. Google's annual revenue is ~400 B and it's CEO makes ~200 M/yr while USA's annual reveune is ~5,000 B and Trump makes ~0.4 M/yr.

Ex. Google's board members make ~500 k/yr while congress critters make < 150 k/yr

But also the GS-15 caps out around 200k which means that the best you're going to make in the USG is worse than an entry level employee at Google.

[bigfatkitten]

They absolutely are subject to market forces — the labour market.

Try hiring 100 software developers at civil service rates. You’ll get maybe 10 very talented people who are in it for “the mission” or for other ideological reasons, and about 90 who would be unemployable anywhere else.

And that’s after you’ve already excluded 95% of the market with citizenship and location requirements, suitability to hold a security clearance etc.

[zdragnar]

> As a department you can't hire programmers at £100k/year, because that pushes them way, way higher than civil service bands allow

[flawn]

And as if there isn't a middle-way here to have short-term contractors _not_ from large consultancies.

Or rethinking approaches, and doing such work via OSS, and paying maintainers to keep code up to date, which France has been doing iirc.

[selfhoster1312]

France is a very bad example if you're gonna talk about State corruption (and taking insane amounts of public money into private pockets) and FLOSS maintenance. There's very isolated cases of public services producing free-software, but that's a drop in the ocean compared to the billions siphoned out of our pockets for Microsoft, Palantir, or other profoundly-incapable consultancies such as Atos, Bull, Thales, McKinsey.

[jappgar]

And this mistrust is deliberately sewn by right-wing politicians and media figures who are directly funded by government contractors.

[whimsicalism]

I worked in the federal government once. Unfortunately, it really is that bad. They took weeks-month just to provision me a laptop.

[jshier]

That happens at literally every company I contract with (that requires I use their equipment). At my current gig I couldn't start until they had a laptop for me, and then it took another month to access to the code. Every year they auto delete contractor credentials, unless the director in charge of your contract says no. One year he missed the email and I found myself without access to the code for days while I was reinstated. Only I wasn't completely reinstated, I had been deleted from one of their systems, so I couldn't log into some systems for multiple weeks, until I got a new PKIM card, since a new card was the only way to add credentials to the right system.

So please, it's never been accurate to say the government is mismanaged while corporations aren't. The same things happens in bureaucracies of similar size.

[whimsicalism]

I work in a bureaucracy of similar size and could never imagine something like that happening where I work.

Corporations might be mismanaged, but ultimately they have a variety of price signals they must be responsive to or die. No such thing among the feds and it shows.

[tim333]

> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good

actually kind of makes sense. The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't. A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.

[forlorn_mammoth]

> The £600 a day is as long as you need it and can be stopped when you don't.

Sure. Because the government only needs a finite amount of software, and once it's written its more efficient to drop the people who wrote it.

> a guaranteed job for life

so the person will have to deal with all of their shit if they wrote crappy stuff. Obviously not the incentives we want.

> and gold plated pension.

because who wants people to be able to actually retire? Isn't it better to keep them working as greeters at Walmart?

[ilikerashers]

Thing is, if you are a good developer/architect, you have lots of options to make this elsewhere. £100k is not a very high salary in London.

Most of the GDS crowd (who were good), left to go elsewhere due to boredom/frustration.

The cost of not having good staff is very high to government. DEFRA were recently hiring senior enterprise architects on £70k. They could burn a lot of money (millions) on poor technical decision making but somehow saving 30-50k is the priority.

[7952]

£100k per year means their boss gets the blame if things go wrong. £120k means you get to blame the contractor. It's an accountability sink.

[joe_mamba]

> A £100k government employee basically has a guaranteed job for life and gold plated pension.

Sounds like we really need to rethink this massive perk about government jobs. Having a class of people with guaranteed employed for life with no accountability on performance or value they add, always seemed absolutely insane to me.

[carlos_rpn]

I'm pretty sure they're "employed for life" because otherwise every new administration would replace as many people as possible.

Can you picture a company replacing 90% of their workforce every 4 or 8 years, all at once? Because that's what I think would happen if government employees could be fired as easily.

[selfhoster1312]

I don't know much about the UK, but it's really common here in France for public servants to be fired. Including for very wrong reasons such as being unionized. The accountability problem lies with the managers imposing meaningless KPIs (even in life-threatening scenarios such as hospitals and police stations) and high-level politicians who are parasites sucking off public money to destroy public services and give it all to their private-company friends who are going to employ them for very high salaries right after they leave the public service, a practice known as pantouflage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantouflage

[harvey9]

It is somewhat an exaggeration. The civil service and quangocracy can make redundancies if they really try.

[roenxi]

Just wandering in to this as a relative political bystander, but as I look at the polling out of the UK [0] I see that the party currently leading is some group called "REF" and I gather they did pretty well in the latest round of elections. I assume they're an old-established party who represent the deep contentment the British have with how the public service has been run.

I suppose they do seem a little unpopular, they aren't breaking 30% but they seem relatively popular compared to the more fringe groups like, say, LAB and CON. Have they, in what I assume is decades of stable political governance, made any mistakes that might have engendered this ideological distrust in how well the political system is managed?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...

[pjc50]

While you've clearly mastered the tone of supercilious sarcasm that is the mainstay of British politics, I should point out to the audience that the Farage party is entirely the billionaire and foreign propaganda party, which is why they are successful.

See eg https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c072prlxlddo

Meanwhile, at least eight of their councilors elected last week have quit already due to comedy levels of misconduct. https://www.markpack.org.uk/176783/how-many-councillors-has-...

[roenxi]

So, in a moment of clarification, your official position on this one is going to be that the 2 majors are at high risk of being knocked into 3rd/4th place by the greens, and this isn't a reflection on their failures of governance over the decades?

I'm not actually sure what you're proposing you think the major reasons are, since that article is just a reminder that people with money have noticed what a disaster the EU is too, not just average voters.

> While you've clearly mastered the tone of supercilious sarcasm that is the mainstay of British politics...

I will admit a feeling of loss that I couldn't work in "unstained escutcheon" but that would be too obscure a reference. I doubt Rees-Mogg would have baulked.

> Meanwhile, at least eight of their councilors elected last week have quit already due to comedy levels of misconduct.

And a supplementary question - do you feel this is "ideological mistrust of the public sector" coming through? Or is it something else when you do it?

[tim333]

Reform are the new Trump like, kick the immigrants out party. I don't know if they'd achieve the operational excellence that Trump and DOGE have.

[skeletal88]

In Estonia this was solved by moving all the IT related people to organisations adjacent to the ministries and departments, so the lower paid civil servants wont have to be compared to the highly paid software developers and architects, etc. One colleague used to work as and architect of the justice ministry. He said the suit wearing civil servants with law degrees were pissed off at the homeless looking sweatshirt wearing software developers who were much higher paid. So the IT stuff was moved to another new department, but it still answers to the minister.

Similar stuff with other ministries. Interior ministry has their own it department, where they develop and maintain the population registry, criminal registries, and stuff that requires a security clearance

[vlovich123]

I’m not sure I buy that. That doesn’t explain what happens when the ministers budget gets slashed and as government policy there’s a push to outsource. It requires consistent commitment at a cultural level across governments. It works in Estonia because Estonia is a small enough country that there’s just no financial incentive for lobbying and it’s let to do its own thing.

[rayiner]

This seems like a very practical solution lol.

[tekacs]

I remember chatting with the then-mayor of Cambridge, UK about this.

Specifically, he bemoaned how well-intentioned anti-corruption measures meant that if they wanted to lean on a startup, it was practically impossible to do so. The risk that had been mitigated was that of someone like him giving money to his family or friends – which is an understandable risk to try to mitigate! But the net effect of that was that IBM got all the contracts at a wildly higher cost and with no ability to lean on small business.

[kitd]

That happens at all large organisations. I worked at a large oil company and if our contracts with a vendor represented (or would have represented) more than a certain % (i forget what) of that vendors business, they didn't get the contract. As well as having vendors more likely to stay in existence, it stops the org being "morally responsible" for keeping them afloat.

[Zenst]

I contracted for ICL around the time it was acquired by Fujitsu, working opposite the Post Office developers, some of whom were still learning C++ as they went.

I later worked at the Department of Health during the Blair-era restructuring, when management layers multiplied, Trust structures became increasingly fragmented, and PFI debt created long-term financial drag. I also encountered someone trying to sell internal documents, which says plenty about the governance culture at the time.

Then I saw the BBC go through outsourcing to Fujitsu, with assets sold off and then effectively contracted back.

Across utilities, government, healthcare and broadcasting, the pattern has been depressingly consistent: short-term accounting savings, long-term operational debt, and layers of complexity presented as reform. Problems are rarely solved. They are moved around, rebranded, outsourced, and made to look resolved until the next team inherits the consequences.

Capgemini, Fujitsu and the usual suspects do well out of it. The public sector gets another five-year spreadsheet win, while the real-world cost lands years later with someone else.

All rather depressing when you see it first hand and many stories I dare not tell, from Ministers and their `shadows`(what their assistants called), upper goverment stories and even from infosec days involving banks and financial intertutions and how links that should never be there were found. Networks connected by undocumented lines and other things that just make you go WTF at levels of disbelief, even No.10 dealings that again, best left unspoken.

Just a system that focuses on being seen to care, over actually careing and if you do care, you are either broken or scared for life.

Oh well, be another decade or two to unpick the debt bombing this time around and those that cause it, never held to account as seagull managment is now the norm in many walks of life along with doing little waiting for pensions with pension surfing. This that care, die, those who don't get promoted on lies.

I will write a book to be published when i'm gone(soon) and just not care then, until then, I care, just wished those with power actually did.

[bfmalky]

I recently joined a civil service organisation as a software developer. The organisation is currently going through an intense hiring process to replace the army of contractors they've had for years. This has been made possible by applying a 'market uplift' to the usual civil service salary bands to make the roles competitive in the tech industry. It seems to be going pretty well, although the organisation was already quite tech focused and has a well established engineering culture. Hopefully it will be seen as a success and replicated by other departments as seems like the sensible way to get stuff done to me.

[robertlagrant]

The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.

I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.

[pjc50]

> there is always the risk of bloat

The fantasy lies in ignoring the same risk when it's happening in a private sector contractor, doing the same job for objectively much higher costs.

[robertlagrant]

I agree, but also a civil servant has incredible pension opportunities, and defined benefit as well, and is hard to remove if they turn out to be bad. A contractor is a fixed cost, and individuals can be rejected with far less ceremony and cost.

If the civil service could shape its workforce with individualised salaries and quicker removal due to low performance I suspect it'd be a different story. I agree that consultancies and contractors are not cheap, but they are not the root cause.

[skippyboxedhero]

Correct, the main reason why private sector is used is nothing to do with salary.

Productivity hasn't increased in the public sector since 1997 due to massive overhiring and bloat, salaries are probably 20-30% higher than they should be based upon on productivity. And the main cost, which isn't factored into the above tired lobbying arguments you read from "sources" in the Guardian, is pensions. Public-sector pensions will rise to 10% of all public spending in the near future.

This is all by intent by the way, the primary issue is that existing employees have impossibly good conditions and it is effectively impossible to reform the system in any way. So you have these people are massively overpaid by any measure screeching about private sector hiring...okay, alternative: 20-30% of workforce are sacked, pensions converted to private scheme with 2% employer contribution, stack rank every year until public sector productivity equals private sector productivity.

[forlorn_mammoth]

> Productivity hasn't increased in the public sector since 1997

Hmm, in the US the size of the civil service was roughly constant over 20 years, while the population it served grew enormously as well as the amount of service it was supposed to provide.

[skippyboxedhero]

This isn't the US. Public sector productivity output (in the UK) is measured, it isn't a speculation based upon the population.

[sillyfluke]

What you wrote has nothing to do with what the parent wrote.

>There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.

The parent is specifically claiming gov jobs don't allow for near market rates. That number would literally be formulated by current market pressures. If that goes lower in the private sector it will go lower in the gov sector.

For your point to be correct with respect to their specific example, you would have to claim the gov could pay £300k/year when the going market rate was £100k/year and there would be no pressure to prevent this. Whereas all it would take would be someone to ask why a run-of-the-mill programmer is getting paid 3x the market rate?

[robertlagrant]

That part was referring to the air-quotes here:

> but at least you won't have "inefficient civil service bloat" to have to manage.

[sillyfluke]

Right, but you simply stated but haven't explained why bloat is inevitable in the government except to say there is no market pressure applied in government. Whereas the parent is literally talking about employing people using market rates, an example based on market pressure.

[robertlagrant]

> you simply stated but haven't explained why bloat is inevitable in the government except to say there is no market pressure applied in government. Whereas the parent is literally talking about employing people using market rates, an example based on market pressure.

The market pressure I'm referring to isn't on salaries, it's on departments. If a department gets the same budget next year because it managed to spend it all this year - a universal truth in UK public sector then departments only ever grow.

[komali2]

Don't companies also always grow?

[rayiner]

As soon as you raise the pay scales to allow programmers to get paid market rates, the people whose jobs don’t command that kind of money in the market will exploit the new pay scales. In the private sector, the underwater basket weaving majors hate how much more programmers make. In the government, they’ll have the power to actually equalize that pay at the taxpayer’s expense.

[forlorn_mammoth]

> The problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders.

repeated like a mantra.

As if megacorps somehow don't have inefficiencies. And how do we even measure efficiency?

[bit-anarchist]

You have it backwards. All governments are megacorps and have the same inefficiencies as them, plus the inefficiencies of being able legally stea- tax.

[robertlagrant]

> As if megacorps somehow don't have inefficiencies

No one is saying megacorps don't have inefficiencies.

[marcta]

Yes Minister has something about this, I seem to remember. Because the government isn't profit motivated, they are instead motivated by the size of their budget and the number of employees.

[classified]

Yes, it's the fairy tale from the 1980s that if you privatize a public service it magically becomes "efficient" and cheaper. Those who believe this BS must be really bad at arithmetic.

[arjie]

That seems entirely logical if you:

* need the ability to stop paying the person

* have a duty-cycle lower than 83% on the contractor over the next 10 years

Paying a premium for flexibility is pretty standard business practice. I suppose I’m somewhat surprised the gap is merely 20%. With the triple-lock etc. in place I think that’s a screaming deal and I would take on as many substitutions as possible.

[gaiagraphia]

Remember hearing about Albania during the Cold War.

They turned away from the Soviets because the Soviets only wanted them to be an agricultural nation, and wouldn't allow them to develop their own industry.

When the powers that be refuse to invest in themselves and demand that external providers must be used, it does make you wonder...

[andsoitis]

> £100k/year = bad, £120k/year

Just keep in mind that if you pay someone a salary of £100k, your expense for that employee is actually much higher. So £120k would be less expensive and you also don’t take on thr risk and cost of developing a system (you’re getting “off the shelf”).

[justin66]

Hopefully it goes without saying but the person you're responding to was just giving an example. The contractor vs. permanent employee pay gap absurdity they're highlighting in government contracting is often much more profound than 20%. 100% higher pay for contractors doing the equivalent work in the US isn't uncommon.

[philipallstar]

Pay yes, but not cost.

[justin66]

That’s just delusional.

[andsoitis]

Why do you say that? The cost to a company for an employee ranges anywhere from 120% to 200% of the compensation paid to the employee.

[selfhoster1312]

Here in France pay for IT jobs in public services is more around 20-40k€/year, while consultants brought from the private sector cost somewhere between 500-3000€/day.

Let's be very pessimistic about it (in real life it's much less), and say the public servant is gonna cost you 80k€/year. That's still at the VERY least ~50% cheaper than the 150k€/year consultant.

It's mathematically impossible for a consultancy putting money into shareholders to be more economically-efficient than a public administration. There's not a single historical example of that. Privatization of railway, energy and hospitals here in Europe was supposed to bring better service and reduce costs: it has done exactly the opposite.

[footydude]

You can also (generally) turn off the taps of the cost of the £120k/year incredibly quickly.

By comparison it is much harder (and also much more likely to generate negative newspaper headlines) to make 500 people redundant.

[DrBazza]

Although the Government (and local Government) can employ 'heads' at market rate. It's just the rank-and-file that have banded salaries.

When you realise that any Government is ultimately a business, it's revenue is mostly tax, and its costs, are like any other business - salaries, then crappy salaries for Government employees makes more sense.

> So, £100k/year = bad, £120k/year via an external consultancy = good.

There's also the (implicit) argument that the (UK) Government is also not having to pay up a (Civil Service) pension scheme, private health (!!), and the consultancy is picking that up, so that's also 'good'.

[anakaine]

Im in government elsewhere, and the same problems prevail. Fortunately my department had the executive foresight and skill to build a group internally who could provide digital architecture, engineering, development, security, and run projects. There is still a contractor base, but its only about 20% of the head count.

[noir_lord]

> This all started in the 1980s

It did, I'd argue the first (and in a sense final) nail in the coffin was the Electricity Act (1989).