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UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

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Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#101

Post by CommanderData »

SilverBirch wrote: post #97
CommanderData wrote: post #28

For the non-British here. Taxes are paid automatically in the UK to the tax man through a system called "Pay As You Earn - PAYE". Take home pay is closer to 41k. If the applicant has a student loan. These might take 30 years to pay off at the default 6% from gross (3.3k). Then there are pension contributions too which are opt-out now at usually 5% gross (2.75k). All deducted automatically. No remote advertised, the a…

It's civil service, which means a defined benefit pension paid by the civil service which is valued at some crazy value - like 27% of salary per year with the employee only needing to contribute something like 5%.

Thanks good to know. I've adjusted.

Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#102

Post by callahad »

manojlds wrote: post #13

Side point - is £100k really $200k equivalent in US? With the huge costs here and how costly things are including consumer electronics, shouldn't it be cheaper in US as well? (I just moved to UK from India 6 months back)

Moved from Minneapolis to Belfast in 2017 at roughly those rates and our standard of living actually went up.

Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#103

Post by vidarh »

dan-robertson wrote: post #63
vidarh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I earn well above that and my effective tax rate is well below 50%. The top marginal rate is 47% except for a narrow band due to phase out of personal allowance, but my effective rate is lower. With respect to VAT, it nudges my total tax paid up about 4 percentage points. Total, including VAT, NI, and council tax is still well below 50%. Remember, you're not going to spend nearly all of your pre tax earnings on VAT r…

It’s worth considering employer payroll taxes which might be different (though my memory from looking it up a while ago was that the payroll taxes weren’t so different). It’s also possible to have another effective 9% marginal tax from student ‘loans’ though that will go away after a while.

It's not normal to count payroll taxes as part of the employers tax, as that would also increase the gross salary above that which the employee considers their salary to be. E.g. nobody factors that in when comparing California salaries to the many US states with no payroll tax.

Even so, you need to get up towards 300k GBP/year to exceed 50% even with the payroll tax. And that assumes you're making zero pension contributions (as contributions are offset against your tax up to 40k gross/year)

With respect to student loans, sure, you can add that in but then you need to do that when comparing to the US salary levels in this thread too.

Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#104

Post by sandworm101 »

baazaa wrote: post #75

This is a problem across the civil service, although not as stark as this example usually. The cult of the generalist has long meant that specific skills are considered almost worthless. Instead of the civil service being an assemblage of people with different skill-sets, it instead consists chiefly of administrators with no more skills than a high-school graduate (although they do have tertiary degrees). Jobs which…

I seriously doubt that the head of cyber security at such a place would ever do any coding. The primary job would be administrative, the needed skill the management of people. 55k is a joke, but lets not pretend that this position requires l33t hacking skills. This is a job about hiring and firing people, about selecting policy and judging the qualification of prospective contractors. And it's a job about writing reports and presenting them to higher authorities and investigative committees, not the sort of things taught at bootcamps.

Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#105

Post by goodpoint »

manojlds wrote: post #13

Side point - is £100k really $200k equivalent in US? With the huge costs here and how costly things are including consumer electronics, shouldn't it be cheaper in US as well? (I just moved to UK from India 6 months back)

It really is. Of course you have to compare things like housing, food and health services and general quality of life, not electronics.

Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#106

Post by TrackerFF »

Some thoughts:

1) That's the salary range they've specified, if the right applicant comes along they can probably stretch a good deal. My last work was for the gov., and even though they had a specified salary range in the job listing, they paid 20%-30% more to certain hires.

2) These types of jobs come with a certain "prestige" attached to them, which can open doors later - much, much higher paying and powerful doors. And that's a general thing when it comes to such jobs, people are willing to slash their paycheck in half if it's powerful enough

3) The type of applicant for these jobs are (in my experience) much more driven by ideology than money. Gov. jobs can never compete on salary, that's just a fact of life. But they do still get excellent applicants, that are burning for certain things

4) Many of these applicants don't need higher salaries - they're already financially independent.

Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#108

Post by goodpoint »

sunaurus wrote: post #90
shawabawa3 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops somehow skipped that paragraph, yeah that's nonsense. Unless you're comparing SF to small town UK or something

I have an example from elsewhere in Europe. 115k a year in my country (~90k after all taxes), in the suburb of a city with 100k population, gets you the following: mortgage payments for a nice 4 bedroom house, payments for a luxury car, fuel, all necessities like electricity, internet, heating, water, food, etc. After covering all living costs, you will have around 60k of free money left over. Basic necessities like…

> Would the left over amount be similar in the US from 115k near a similarly sized city?

In a city where you actually find jobs as developer for 230k a year - no.

Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#109

Post by fallingknife »

Neil44 wrote: post #9

London based as well. You’d earn more in Pret-a-Manger. Wages always put me off gov jobs as well as the bureaucracy.

The government is a special place where unskilled employees make much more than they would in the private sector, and highly skilled or leadership positions make much less than they would in the private sector. The main benefit is that you are essentially unfireable unless you commit a crime. The results are quite predictable.

Re: UK Treasury trying to find a Head of Cyber Security for £55k

#110

Post by SXX »

reedf1 wrote: post #77

This has caused a bit of a stir because the UK hasn't quite understood the relative weakness of wage growth for the last 10 years. The culturally understood milestones of "high pay" 30/50k have also not increased with inflation. I get paid well for the UK - but I could triple or even quadruple my salary in the US/Australia. Combined with relatively high taxes (my marginal tax rate is 60%) - it isn't a great value pro…

Healthcare is free in UK of course and this is hug compared to US situation, but I do have a few older friends who moved to EU simply because there are countries with as good healthcare and much less waiting.
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