[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.