The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year
zdnet.com
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The _main_ problem is not that the govt lacks the _knowledge_ about what to do ... it is that they lack the _will_ to do it.
Also, professionally, if you find yourself in this environment: GTFO yesterday. It's toxic, and will take it's emotional toll over time. Especially if you're technically talented there's always a market for your skill... keep bouncing until you find a place that respects you as a professional/person.
Of course, that does bring other problems...
The only limitation is the semi-independence of the civil service, which Cummings intends to erase, and the possibility of judicial review of really bad decisions, which may be curtailed soon.
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. Most of the great teams left. Much of their material is still there, but it's not growing.
So yeah, that's why.
Can you give some examples so I can understand?
It came across one of the frustrations was gov.uk is a long term product, governments switch and their leaders switch every few years as do the priorities so it’s hard to work with a long term roadmap.
I suspect the person in this role won't have the power or authority to do that. Clerks are notoriously protective of 'the process' and resist any changes to it.
This honestly sounds like a miserable job and anyone who's actually worked in this space would agree that this person has virtually no chance of succeeding.
You can't change anything. You have to graft on top of it.
Strategically, the play for a few successive governments has been to stand up new arms length agencies outside the public service proper that have missions to develop new platforms, with the intent to migrate the public service to them when they arrive.
The successes have been where the stand-alone agencies manage to deliver and maintain their independence. The failures have been where they have become captured by "secondments," where mandarins or "retired" ones leverage their way into governance roles, subordinate them to the old system, and turn them into the same broken and staid institutions they were designed to replace.
The successes were expensive but their success amortizes that cost. The symptoms of the failed ones were visible early on, generally because of Party-connected consulting firms owning the HR contracts for them and using them as patronage factories and slush funds.
Change requires freedom, and that freedom requires independence. The accountability risk is real, and the challenge with oversight was that the overseers simply folded the agencies back into the morass.
If I were running this, I would take a radical approach, where the strategy would be a venture model that micro-funded projects to create useful products that solved for providing future services and applications, and not legacy ones.
Priority one is a set of useful and privacy preserving identity services with varying levels of assurance that meet the needs of regular people, not just public servants, as all public servants are citizens first, so are researchers, academics, police and everyone else. This must be exogenous and adopted willingly, and not forced down as a national identity scheme. Second would be an investment in FHE and other privacy technologies because they can preclude and even obviate the need to stand up new private infrastructure to support data exchange. Third, I would invest in federated and distributed techs (git/BC/OIDC, etc) because interoperability is the ONLY problem government is designed to solve well because fundamentally it is a coordination and interoperability layer for society in everything it does.
While I am not qualified for this job, with a long enough lever, I have no doubt I could move the whole thing.
The above is more similar to some ideas being floated about in various halls of government than you might think. That of course doesn't mean it will happen, given the quirks of government.
> While I am not qualified for this job, with a long enough lever, I have no doubt I could move the whole thing.
I think your above insight and actually addressing some of the real issues and opportunities shows you are (technically-speaking) well-qualified for the job. Better than a lot of candidates, and better than anyone else that will take up the post.
The fiefdoms in central government are very real, but there's a value to the people who are able to navigate these, use rivalries to good effect, and achieve the desired outcome by pitching everyone off against each other correctly. Of course very different in a "CDO" role than as an outside consultant coming in with a scoped brief of what needs achieved and which eggs are able to be cracked in the process.
The sad part is that the whole system is such that you'll probably not want to apply for the role, due to the highly politicised nature of most senior appointments - you need to implement what an elected minister wants, even if it doesn't make technical sense. The civil servants who are happy to project-manage the blockchain-backed AI-enabled boondoggle (that lacks a ledger and any form of ML) are the ones that survive.
In the ~20y I've been around govt, arguably Linux, GitHub, Docker, Jira/Atlassian, PowerBI, VMWare, LinkedIn, SalesForce, and even Twitter have done more to transform government than any endogenous solution could. EVen in the last 5 years, AirBNB and Uber have altered the economics of municipalities faster than anything planned might have. These techs are all still in early stages there, (and the economics of devops break public service finance, but that's another story) but you can see the downstream effects they have.
So far regarding public services, my two favourite models have been In-Q-Tel and 18f.gov. The first is far upstream, and the second has been a way to navigate it. It's worth considering that a public sector CTO role is really a "steady hand on the tiller" role to navigate the things we're all building upstream. The CTO is a necessary role, but my experience is that heroes and visionaries will likely select out fast, and framing it as a navigator role might yield different results.
Gov.uk saw a great turnover of talent under the Tories (starting with the Tory/Lib Dem coalition) as many people were simply disenfranchised/unaligned with Tory rule but also felt equally uninspired at the prospect of a Corbin government. Faced with no great outcome, people left.
Many qualified people in the private sector are going to pass, especially as you probably can't also invest or sit on the boards of other companies and all the other stuff tech execs do to further enhance their careers and wealth.
It is of no surprise to me they can't find suitably qualified folks to run this, the pool size of the intersections above (ideologically aligned with Tories, well qualified, open to pay cut) is minute.
And that's before you even consider the well made points in the other comments; that this is probably a bit of a shit job in the first place.
My time at the BBC showed that public-service/civil-service tech leadership is part people management, part political maneuvering, part vision and a small dose of any actually tech experience. It's certainly more CIO not CTO.
To use an analogy. Instead of trying to upgrade the engine in a model T to a modern block, start over. Get a new office, get a small team to redesign the workflow. Then test it live, handle the exact same workload as the existing office and fix problems until everything mostly works. Give first dibs on the permanent jobs to the folks from the old office. Hire for the rest and pray you met budget. If you did start over with the next office. If not, you'll be replaced shortly.
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.
The challenge is these jobs is not setting the strategy. It's getting everyone involved to actually listen to you and follow through. Just because you have "chief" in your job title doesn't mean established bureaucrats will listen to you without question.
Maybe the reason they can't find anyone to do this is that they are underpaying for the position. The responsibilities described sound at least at the level of a Senior VP, if not higher, at a large tech company. Those positions typically pay more than 10x that compensation. In addition, being in government comes with its own unique set of headaches and scrutiny that people in the private sector would not have.
You are telling me that senior VPs make 2.5 million USD each year?
Most senior/staff engineering ICs at large tech companies make much more than 250k USD.
Senior individual contributors are probably making $350-500k a year.
Directors easily hitting $500-1m a year.
And we're not even at the VP level yet.
The role they are asking for sounds like it requires a deep understanding of software development, people management, and the UK government to be effective, for a entry-level compensation .
Do any of these sort of salaries exist outside of the US? How about outside of FAANG companies?
I personally haven't seem them outside of the bay area.
As mentioned elsewhere I'm a new grad with ballpark 200k usd total compensation. My base salary is ~2/3rds of my compensation.
It seems to be a Morton's fork of expertise and stakeholding separation. If they are of the bueracracy they may be tempted to use it to exfiltrate wealth to cronies. If done by a ballot initiative they by definition wouldn't be informed at large about specialist topics (if they were it would fail to be specialist) and would be outside the context.
Being willing to pay a million for proper results would be a good deal but the devil is in the details for how to do it right systemically which is hard even before dealing with people in the system.
Like others have pointed out, many times people see the government job as a stepping stone to a cushy private job where they will make the real money. Thus, government employees treat the big companies with kid gloves because they don’t want to jeopardize future employment. If instead, the government job actually paid a competitive salary, they would be more focused on their current position and not trying to make sure they kept their future private employers happy.
The type who would want this, would be those who want the kudos of working in that environment.
Now to get somebody good and also keen - that's very few people indeed.
Also working in government environments can be mixed, I've dealt with ministers with more common sense and ability to grasp the gravitas of a potential issue instantly and others who will kick any such can down roads of paperwork. Navigating all that is a skill that is needed on-par with the ability to tech. Knowing when to be blunt about an issue or when to pre-navigate the land mines of doubts. I can think of very few people who I've worked with who would be close to handling that. I know a fair few who could do the tech side, but the political/management navigation in government is a whole level of skill-set that you just can't get out of a book and whilst I know some good at that - both, a rare commodity indeed.
Governments really just need to be competitive with their pay if they’re going be successful in their missions. Though, for a lot of people, a successful government is undesirable...
For the same reason that someone who is a lawyer can be Prime Minister, and only make ~$250K running an entire country, or go private and make millions as a top lawyer. Same deal here in Canada. The best that recent CIO of Canada did was bump his pay to a Deputy Minister level, still around the $200K CDN mark.
He (Alex Benay) left after 2 years on the job.
Also, this job's true description, is convincing people entrenched in the old ways, to convert. That's it. Forget about everything else. At this level, you are not technical, you are trying to sell value to higher ups. Some of these folks are not technical at all, and you will hit roadblocks.
I'd personally take that job offer in a heartbeat (And would recommend anyone else to do so as well), because I'd have ~50/50 odds of failing upwards or downwards.
Heads, I win, and my next job would be the C-whatever of a S&P 500 company for real wages.
Tails, I lose, and my next job would be the C-whatever of a Fortune 5000 company, also for real wages.
But the parent poster I was responding to was painting it as a terrible job. I was pointing out that for those of us that don't have the privilege of being in the C-level of the Fortune 500 club (Which is, to some approximation, some large number of nines of the userbase of HN), this sort of job would actually be pretty good, not because of what you do in it, but because of the doors it opens.
I've seen too many political animals fail upward from one disaster to another to imagine that there's nothing career-boosting that can be salvaged from that job posting.
Question for the Brits here: how long would it take someone making this salary, and supporting a family, to afford the down payment to a reasonably sized house within 1/2 hour of where they would be working (which I assume is central London)?
If you can expand the distance to within 45 minutes you'd get a lot more for your money as that suddenly puts a reasonable area outside of the M25 within reach.
I guess it depends on expectations.
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 position is set up to fail and a simple google search could have shown as much.
FAANG is also quite a bit harder to get into in London than in the valley, smaller offices and more picky.
They are probably getting a fair number of resume's from CIO's at smaller companies, or mid level people. And like all good HR departments rejecting everyone who isn't making a horizontal move.
OTOH, lets say your looking for a pay raise, would you go deal with the government or jump ship and take a title cut at a us based multinational?
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3502418-apple-hires-astrazenec...
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.
This may itself be one of the reasons why the UK never developed one of the trillion-dollar businesses that they are reportedly looking to create.