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Comment by K0SM0S | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotal, but a couple years ago I spoke with an engineer working at the BBC and he had nothing but praise for the kind of state-of-the-art work they were doing (our initial topic was GPU clusters), most of it on Red Hat Linux — in sharp contrast with most of this industry apparently, at least historically.

They really seemed to have a well-funded, well-hired and well-meaning engineering department.

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I work with quite a few ex-BBC developers. It seems to be more of a labor of love. They universally have said that it's poorly paid, relatively.

I've often wondered what causes I would take a big pay cut to work for, and that is probably one of them for me. Always loved the BBC.

Yeah, paywise you could get more working for some bank etc in the private sector and my first job working for Eastern ELectricity Board saw me on a £3k salary a year (1983), left and tripled that.

When I worked for the BBC (2002) I was on £42k a year, official title was DBA, though did more non DBA work and was at a level in which I could tell the top people my views and what needed to be done and they listened.

Thing is in tech, it's not what you're paid per year, it's how many hours you work for that pay a year. Could have a £50k job and work 9-5 or a £50k job and end up cutting 80 hours weeks all the time. Details like that are never reflected in the salary.

And how good the work is. In the Beeb, I worked on interesting projects, for a worthy cause, using a tech stack chosen collectively by the team. Many of the projects instigated by the team, rather than pushed on to us from elsewhere.

Since leaving, a lot of the work I have done has been boring and predetermined.

I might add - the pay has got much worse since you were there. The collective pay increase was 1% most years, which also applied to the banding so would have affected new hires as well. Since 2011, the pension has been no better than in any other organisation.

Yes, if you don't buy their product you can end up in jail...they are very well-funded.

As an employee, not having a TV license if you needed done was gross misconduct. Which is probably still the case.

As for the license - personally that needed overhauling years ago, should just pop a % tax on all these streaming and subscription services and cover the bbc from that. Alas it has so many niche area's and legacy that to transition to a private entity would change it into something people would not like or appreciate and kill it - that seems in part to be known by government at least. Also, BBC monitoring and things like that have a role for the country/government.

So let me get this straight:

I pay money to you to develop a TV program, you sell that TV program to Netflix and make money, and then you tax me purchasing the product. So instead of being content with fleecing me once, you want to fleece me three times...er, no. And the idea of funding yourself by taxing your competition is utterly repellent.

I am not unfamiliar with the BBC, most of my knowledge about Kangaroo came from someone I knew who was on the Trust, but it is just a totally broken institution. I have never managed to work out if the hiring policy just finds bad people or something happens to people they hire after they start working there but it is just horribly broken.

>I pay money to you to develop a TV program, you sell that TV program to Netflix and make money, and then you tax me purchasing the product. So instead of being content with fleecing me once, you want to fleece me three times...er, no. And the idea of funding yourself by taxing your competition is utterly repellent.

No, that's not what I suggested, as I was advocating replacing the TV license, not running it in parallel as you portray, so no, just no.

>I am not unfamiliar with the BBC, most of my knowledge about Kangaroo came from someone I knew who was on the Trust, but it is just a totally broken institution. I have never managed to work out if the hiring policy just finds bad people or something happens to people they hire after they start working there but it is just horribly broken.

You seem to confuse your experience with `management` and project that upon all staff and without qualifying what you class as `bad` and yet happily postulate that as record, most odd.

Haha, you really don't get this. I have already paid the licence fee, you have already the developed the program...you are just charging me a third time for it.

The BBC Trust isn't (wasn't) "management".

I class as bad almost everything you have said. It is self-evident. Fundamentally, I disagree with people being ripped off.

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