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>The stuff you see in local govt/healthcare would bring people on here to tears. The local govt was trying to hire people to improve processes...their listed tech contained no programming languages and just included managed services. You see tech roles, and it is all the same: just managed services, no actual coding...it is incredible.

you talk about hiring under-qualified people, but they also hire over-qualified people and don't know what to do with them.

I got hired out of university as a "data scientist" in the govt; but it turned out they actually didn't have any data science to give me. they just slotted me into the same excel clusterfuck workflows they always had. the inefficiency was unimaginable, it was like the spreadsheet dark ages. i tried to clean things up on my own initiative, automate them, have proper version control and data pipelines in code rather than manual steps described in piles of word documents; but I was the only person in my section of the org chart who had the skills or even cared about the problems. I could make things better in my tiny corner, but everyone I had to work with was clueless, so there was only so much I could do. so I just quit out of boredom and frustration.

then I got a SWE job for more than twice the pay.

My friend told me about a government department that got an outside firm to run an online survey. The responses were delivered as one PDF per response. The department had a bunch of junior staff copy pasting these into Excel.

I was a junior guy on a trading desk at a hedge fund once, and I got sent out to our fund administrator to help them produce a NAV for the fund.

All our trading was done by computers, with everything written to a database.

I show up at the fund admin's office, and what do I see? There's two young guys my age sitting there with the printed trades, thousands of them... typing them into a computer. One typing, one double checking. They had been at it for days when I arrived.

I worked in finance and have seen this in fund admin. It is a total backwater that they just drown in staff because grads are basically free (there is one place that I know that is actually in the Highlands, iirc they actually used to do something else but had a small fund admin biz...they grew like crazy because there are grads up there who have literally no choice...it could all be automated but they just keep hiring because they can get skilled labour at £20-25k/year).

When you think that OEICs actually have to trade at that number too...scary.

I have seen this in funds too. I knew one place that had school leavers booking their trades on internal system. They weren't high-frequency but I remember the guy showing me round, and he had three of these guys stacked up in this cupboard with Excel.

What sectors of the UK economy actually have really high performing people, with commensurately high pay? I'm looking for a software job again, got made redundant last week. Hedge funds and FAANG maybe the obvious examples, but I'd rather work in a place that actually makes things rather than shuffle money around or optimize ad clickthru rates.

Where can I find those Type-I organizations that Dominic Cummings keeps banging on about?

You know the answer. Banking and, to a far lesser extent, tech.

They don't exist. Cummings doesn't live on this planet (he hasn't even had enough experience in govt to be called a bureaucrat, he has just had a host of jobs due to family connections...he is the thing he complains so much about).

The UK market is basically Dutch diseased. Work in finance or work for a US company if you want the big bucks.

There are still firms that make things eg Aerospace, and there are orgs that do good work, but you won't get paid anything sensible.

Don't forget you can work remote as well.

Yep, that is what I allude to in my previous comment. Thanks for adding your specific insight.

People in the UK talk about the skills shortage...your comment is exactly what I say in response: what shortage do we have of universities? What shortage do we have of young people willing to use their skills or learn new things? What shortage do we have of job applicants in these roles? We have all the people but go into almost any company (or govt), and look who is managing. It isn't only old people either, I remember interviewing for a place that has had open roles of years, missed the upturn...I interviewed and said told him I hadn't done a11y front-end before (this was full-stack), it was a deal-breaker...as if I could never learn another thing in my life....this guy was a dev.

The thing with govt really gets under my skin because it is so bad and the country needs better. The upside is massive. It is excruciating.

Remember the dumbest 30% of your class in school? Those folks still need jobs. Guess where they emd up?

But this is the same for the Netherlands.

I'm currently in some surreal world because of a large government contract our company had won. Multiple companies are involved. Lack of any meaningful systems, people who have no technical understanding about anything making decisions, data requests have timelines as we could simply magic them up on demand. People don't understand data, statistics, not to mention systems. Some are paid handsomely for, frankly speaking ,not doing much.

I often have an imposter syndrome,but it looks like the bar is really really low.

I think this is the issue everywhere with govt (if you are not based in the UK). But yes, it isn't the lack of use of tech in management, they aren't even aware of what modern tech is. From what I have seen, the managers are "experts" in managed services deployments, there is no capacity for actual tech hires (and then they hire consultants who fuck it up, and they complain about how hard tech is...when a core part of their job should be to hire and run the project).

Complaining about govt is eternal though. My local council offers unskilled, internal-only jobs at pay levels similar to dev jobs in the private sector at the same level of seniority...and the council has twenty people to the job of one person...what can you say?

Managed services? Luxury! I've seen people using table grids in MS Word to do tasks that belong in Excel.

Glad that I'm not the only one.

Processes are a way to give a job, purpose and career prospects to various people in the organization. Despite everyone talking about "digital transformation" and other BS buzzwords, nobody would truly want automation that actually works, because doing so would either obsolete their position outright or force them to actually work hard to keep up with the machine (instead of merely attending endless meetings about "digital transformation" that will at best introduce more busywork rather than actually achieve its stated goal).

Great comment. The economy exists to create jobs. Doesn't matter of what kind, because there's supposed to be X percentage of the population in a certain tax bracket to make everything work.

>they genuinely do not understand anything about technology...it is just pointless, like trying to teach German to a chimp.

My monkey, just told you to "vaffanculo", but s/he genuinely does not understand anything about spiecies. Which is where i dodged a bullet...

Completely agree with this comment als other comments.