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Comment by pants2 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like a very cool job, and not sure about the UK job market, but seems to be wildly underpaid for the qualifications!

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This, shockingly, is actually quite well paid considering for the UK.

Lead Data Scientist for the UK Government is currently advertising for a salary of £57,670 - £67,500.

https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/jobs.cgi?jco...

Government jobs are terribly paid. They tend to have good pensions worth another 15-20k though and tend to be very flexible.

Project manager on 65-85k

https://uk.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=a43416327745431e

Lead data scientist 100-110k

https://www.reed.co.uk/jobs/lead-data-scientist/56925078

Neither of those are London based.

That’s government. They’re notoriously underpaid.

And this is third sector.

Not disagreeing, but it's also worth something to know, and say, that you are in charge of Stonehenge.

Must be an extraordinary honor to be in charge of a bunch of rocks over there.

Wait until you learn some people are swapping bits all day long, isn't that crazy?

I call them Bit Shepherds

Yes?

36 hours per week. 25 days vacation (going to 28). Pension contributions. You can buy extra leave. Epic location, fun job, decent salary for the UK (where e.g. you don't pay for healthcare)...

You do pay for healthcare, from the taxes on that salary.

Fun fact, so do Americans, just they don't get the service for it!

Fun fact, so do Brits. Just try scheduling a procedure with the NHS and check the wait time.

Urgency based on medical reasons rather than financial wealth.

Crazy huh?

It's not "medical reasons"; it's overwhelming government bureaucracy in the UK. A friend of a friend broke his shoulder and collarbone over 14 months ago; he needs a new shoulder. He's been in a sling for over a year. Every couple of months, he gets a call asking if he still wants to have the op. It's disgraceful.

> you don't pay for healthcare

It is bloody expensive, if you want life saving surgery now, not in two years!

Yeah, the 25 days of vacation are a bit disappointing, in Germany 30 days are standard.

Is that including or excluding bank holidays? In the UK, 25 days excluding the 8 bank holidays is pretty standard.

Excluding

Talked to a German guy who was here on holiday recently. When I told him that in the US it's typical to get two weeks vacation when starting a new job, you should have seen his eyes bug out. It was hilarious.

This is like a 90th percentile UK salary.

In reality, because the "salaries" higher than this aren't paying in PAYE.

I’m not sure that’s strictly true. I think you’ve got to go a long way up the salary ladder until you’re in a situation where you can command more complicated arrangements (certainly when working for larger companies)

no. Most UK income statistics are based on total taxable income, not salary.

This is a decent salary for a heritage job. It is a very poorly-paid sector. On building sites with archaeological excavations, the person driving the digger is likely to be paid more than the archaeologists, who probably have postgraduate degrees.

I'm not in the UK, but from what I understand that's actually decent. US salaries, particularly in tech, are wildly higher than in most of Europe.

UK tech salaries are also not high. And 64k pounds for a history and/or business major is quite right. Do not forget also: history is a overrun study with many people afterwards driving taxis

I wouldn't mind a few more archaeologists. They may be many compared to the jobs available, but there should be more jobs available.

Don't forget to deduct the 25% effective tax rate.

Calculator: https://www.tax.service.gov.uk/estimate-paye-take-home-pay/y...

this isnt all that *bad for something in the conservation / heritage / ngo sector

edit: *obviously its not a wonderful salary, but for the sector....well I've seen worse.

Just a smidge over $63k after tax and before gibbs.

The job market over here is shocking.

Lol in Canada 64,000 pounds = $120K CAD which would put you in the 92nd income percentile.

This is equivalent to $85,700 USD, not $63k.

Read it again. $63k after tax and before "gibbs" i.e. government-provided social distributions.

63k after tax in the us is about 86k before tax, so about the same.

Although in the us you have to pay for healthcare on top of that.

You pay for a private healthcare plan, and the US government pays tax money to the same healthcare companies to prop up the system.

You're double-counting the individual.

The charity sector rarely pays well.

Especially considering minimum wage “salary” in the UK is ~24k GBP, 64k is nothing imo. They call it the “wage squeeze”

Average full time salary is 40k GBP. It’s +50% on the average which seems right for a non profit organisation in a non exec role

It is a leadership role though.

I don't know how many staff there are, but it's surely one of EH's most important locations.

This is like 90th percentile UK salary. It's good pay for the UK, a poor country.

The UK is still the 5th biggest economy in the world. Public infrastructure feels like it's under huge strain however, and there is also a big problem with inequality, which seems to be changing under Labour, albeit slowly.

Raw economy size can be misleading in two ways. The value of a dollar is much less or much more depending on where you're at. So an economy of 10 shekels might mean an economy of 100 widgets, or it might mean an economy of 1 widget. Purchasing power parity (PPP) attempts to account for that. The second is that economies are largely a product of population. An economy of a million making a million shekels is quite a bit different than an economy of 10 making a million shekels, so you also want to look at per capita values. Even both of these adjustments combined [1] can be extremely misleading (see: Ireland and many other places...), but they provide at least a less unreasonable basis for comparison than nominal dollars. And the UK is currently 30th there.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...

I think GDP per capita can also be misleading though - the GDP per capita of Luxembourg or Brunei is high, but they're such small countries that it's kind of irrelevant.

Setting aside the special cases (tiny, oil money, weird finance sectors, tax havens etc) there's basically a handful of countries which are clearly doing something right - the US, Taiwan, the north-eastern European countries (Germany, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden). Most of the other "developed countries" are sitting in the same sort of GDP per capita range of $65-$75k. Ranking these isn't so meaningful - the difference between the UK and France is only 1.5%.

Maybe! Our modern economic system are essentially driven by endless debt, and that only began in 1971 after the end of Bretton Woods. Even Germany has recently hopped on the debt train. Personally I not only don't think it's sustainable, and if not then it may well end up being one of the shortest lived economic experiments ever.

Something to keep in mind is that in the 70s digital tech also started to come into its own and that basically provided a massive economic boon to countries worldwide, but especially in the US. And so the concept of endless infinite exponential growth, as the current experiment effectively requires, was coincidentally paired alongside an era that made that briefly seem possible.

But now that that era is fading, the consequences of our actions are catching up to us. For instance in the US interest on the debt is now about 3% of the GDP, and the debt itself about 120% of GDP. And as faith in the debt falters, that will increase exponentially because rates for borrowing (which is how the government 'prints' money) will increase, due to reduced demand paired with increases in supply for such.

Basically instead of looking at GDP or whatever, I'd look to things on life contentment, optimism, and so on. If those are positive, then I think a government must be doing something right. If those are negative, then who cares what this metric or that says?

Inquality has barely moved per Gini in the last thirty years, and GDP is very misleading.

https://ifs.org.uk/data-items/gini-coefficient

Until it's destroyed by the people who destroyed the country last time.

Seems they are hell-bent on getting rid of them

Let's not be delusional. The UK is not a poor country, and 64K is low by US tech standards but it's good by any other measure.

It's not a "good" wage in the US. It's exactly median.

Which is fine, someone has to be median, but really underwhelming for the (presumably highly-educated and talented) head of the #1 national historical monument.

It's £64K, not $64K (which is indeed about the median in the US). So, not bad.

Ah I misread that, but $86k is still not good for a highly educated professional.

Highly educated?

It's a leadership role, there's no education requirements on it.

It is good for a professional with specialization in history.

Superintendent of Mount Rushmore is paid $125–160k

So roughly the same salary :). After subtracting health care, pension, etc plus currency exchange.

No, you did not subtract those things from the UK pay. The $86k pre tax UK wage comes down to something like $64k post tax. Whereas a $125–160k US earner in South Dakota takes home $97-120k, paying another $6k for health insurance. 91 is in fact larger than 64.

The UK is poor and sprinting as fast as it can towards being poorer.

This is such a misuse of the word poor. Have you actually been to a poor country?

The UK is poorer than the US - sure. But it's wealthier than most other countries in the world. Not just in terms of GDP per capita or average household wealth, but also in infrastructure terms - the cumulative effect of being a wealthy industrialised country for so long is a huge amount of infrastructure.

I think it's fair to say that UK wealth growth has slowed at the same time as many other countries have caught up. So the UK is no longer the leader it once was. But that's very different from saying it's a poor country. It's just not.

By your definition 95% of the world population live in 'poor' countries. I guess if that's how you want to use the word that's up to you, but people outside of your bubble will literally not understand what you are saying.

If the UK were a US state, its GDP per capita would rank it roughly on par with or just below Mississippi, making it the poorest state in the union.

While true from a per capita equivalency and too close for comfort, the median net worth of an adult in the UK is roughly $150,000, while in Mississippi it's $15,000. Also, its public services are provided, which substantially affects the quality of life.

The UK has had substantially less wage inequality than the US for a long time. The UK “wage squeeze” is median/minimum wage which has gone from the 1/3 to 2/3 since ~2000 as the minimum wage has been raised. But the relevant difference here would be around 90th percentile/median which is 1.85 in UK vs 2.4 in US and even higher in California.

And over time the ratio is similar - 90%ile about 1.9 times median for the last 30 years.

Yeah, but 25 days holiday plus bank holidays means you're working like half the year at most. ;)

And don't you knock of at lunch on Fridays anyways? So that's like a 4 day work week, because let's face it, you're not really doing anything on the day you're knocking off early anyways. See you at the pub!

Read-Only-Fridays, and having a pub lunch so you're not doing much all afternoon anyway!

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