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The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

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Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#51
post #22

You know what? GOV.UK used to be an amazing team. I mean, seriously, some top talent and a really productive team. They did a remarkable job of understanding the art of the possible and writing clear guides that ordinary people could understand. And then the rest of the civil service and the government saw its brand reputation as a resource to be used much the same way that slash and burn farmers view the Amazon. Mos…

I'm not sure what you're implying here. Are you saying the employees got poached to better paying jobs in other government departments?

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#53

I have some experience with government IT (state and municipal, not national). Anyone in this space knows that changing the bureaucracy essentially requires a legislative or executive mandate. My team once got intense push-back trying to change an extract file's date format from MMDDYY to MMDDYYYY. I suspect the person in this role won't have the power or authority to do that. Clerks are notoriously protective of 'th…

I currently work for a municipal government.

You can't change anything. You have to graft on top of it.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#54
Hmm.. maybe I will apply.. I think the thing a Chief Digital Officer would do would be to map out each organizations data needs and mandate that their product be provided via a SaaS interface to their customers and/or exportable into something like Snowflake or Palantir or maybe a UK provider. Interfaces are the first thing that Bezos mandated for AWS. The latter is probably more risky politically but maybe there's a path there. It's a "we are moving to the Cloud* approach". The APIs and the Snowflake style analysis will allow enterprising organizations to refactor if they want and maybe develop new applications without requiring data source team participation.

Frame it that way or another with the same goal, build out your own cloud team to manage the project and then maybe you'd find success.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard FAANG pay between 70 and 80 in London for mid-level, no? There is a big difference between US and UK salaries. (Big difference in cost of living and taxes)

As a former London based FAANG employee my experience is that base salary might be that for a relatively junior engineer, but a mid-level with 5-8 years experience would make around £150-200k total comp (base, bonus, stock, benefits). 10-15 years experience is £250-400k++ total comp range

I don't think what you call mid-level would be considered only mid-level by other people.

FAANG is also quite a bit harder to get into in London than in the valley, smaller offices and more picky.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#56
post #12
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a quarter million USD per year. You are telling me that senior VPs make 2.5 million USD each year?

Absolutely. Director levels at many large tech companies certainly earn > $1M, even before stock appreciation.

Not in the UK though.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#57
post #34
post #25

>>"All of this and more, for £200,000 a year." Unless the British Government is giving out some windfall of equity this is the compensation package of a mid level software engineer at FAANG. For anyone remotely qualified for this kind of job it is an absurd pay cut. Given this budget I would suspect that the department will also be asked to hire staff at salaries that are well below market rates. In other words the p…

It's more than the PM's official salary. It's almost as much as he was paid for a ten hours a week journo sinecure. https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/ex-foreign-secretary-boris-jo...

> It's more than the PM's official salary

I remember going to a party in west London at the time of the MPs' expenses scandal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_parliamentary_e... - remember when this was our biggest news?) and listening to people saying things like "well it's no wonder they claim for all this stuff, you can't live in London on 60K" (roughly an MP's salary at the time).

I was just amazed by that - as a member of the shiny technological elite I thought of £60K as a pretty fat wedge. Still do really. I think here, and in Europe generally, software people are usually paid as ordinary office workers who happen to have some useful skill, not as transformative irreplaceable self-governing magicians.

Seeing that this job pays £200K actually makes me wonder for a moment if I shouldn't apply myself. I could do two or maybe three years at that salary and never have to work again.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard FAANG pay between 70 and 80 in London for mid-level, no? There is a big difference between US and UK salaries. (Big difference in cost of living and taxes)

As a former London based FAANG employee my experience is that base salary might be that for a relatively junior engineer, but a mid-level with 5-8 years experience would make around £150-200k total comp (base, bonus, stock, benefits). 10-15 years experience is £250-400k++ total comp range

What was your base salary and the compensation?

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#59
post #54

Hmm.. maybe I will apply.. I think the thing a Chief Digital Officer would do would be to map out each organizations data needs and mandate that their product be provided via a SaaS interface to their customers and/or exportable into something like Snowflake or Palantir or maybe a UK provider. Interfaces are the first thing that Bezos mandated for AWS. The latter is probably more risky politically but maybe there's a…

Well said. I’m going to cut and paste this in my application.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard FAANG pay between 70 and 80 in London for mid-level, no? There is a big difference between US and UK salaries. (Big difference in cost of living and taxes)

As a former London based FAANG employee my experience is that base salary might be that for a relatively junior engineer, but a mid-level with 5-8 years experience would make around £150-200k total comp (base, bonus, stock, benefits). 10-15 years experience is £250-400k++ total comp range

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