Comment by zipy124
6 hours ago
The revolving door as it's known. That's part of it. Another is simply the lack of in-house talent, largely due to poor pay and conditions. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent. I'd love to work for NHS digital and make a difference, but all the interesting work is contracted out, so they can't keep the staff who are capable of building themselves. Also the recruitment process is terrible.
Take a look at this job posting for example: https://www.jobs.nhs.uk/candidate/jobadvert/C9175-26-0093 .
The role is more aligned with IT/Data as obvious by the fact that the main skill requirement is SQL.
Look at the salary on offer. This is for a dev/data job in Cambridge. The market rate for a senior developer here was around that level in the early 2000s. Today that would be a big pay cut for almost anyone with even the "essential" skills and experience.
The British government and public sector are constantly limiting themselves by being unwilling to pay market rates for the skills they need. Then they contract out needs like tech to work around the bureaucracy - but they demand so many strings attached that the little guys who are more cost effective don't want anything to do with it. And so they mostly outsource to large firms or sometimes specialist agencies who have jumped through the hoops to get all the right certifications. Naturally those suppliers are in a position to charge premium rates even for relatively simple work.
If the Civil Service built up a capable IT function staffed by properly qualified and experienced people that would surely save billions in budget and years in timescales for some of the (in)famous government IT projects and probably significantly increase the odds of successfully delivering something usable at the end of them. But as anyone who's working in our Civil Service can tell you the emphasis on ranks and pay scales and other very specific rules about career advancement are unlikely to go anywhere any time soon. Even if they did the culture of people moving around the Civil Service like interchangeable parts instead of building up deep expertise in specific areas would still be a problem.
The salary isn't that out of line for a mid-level developer nationwide, but yes I would expect it to be higher for the southern location. They could justify the salary if it was fully remote.
Bear in mind there is a 23.7% pension contribution from the employer, so it's a roughly £62-70k total comp for a mid-level role.
Edit: Actually though, in reality I would expect a salary bump to work in the public sector to encourage one to put up with the terrible working enviornment with all the bureaucracy.
As someone who has recently joined the civil service as a software developer I have to say the working environment in the organisation I joined is pretty great. Salary is not high, but pension, holidays, working hours and flexibility are all very good.
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Yeah having worked _with_ NHSDigital quite a lot over the years, I would not love to work there!
That said, I don't think there's that much wrong with that job description - I've been a software dev/eng for 15yrs and every role has had SQL at its centre. And its much easier to get someone new up to speed on some swanky new UI or scripting tool than it is with SQL IME, so prioritising people who are comfortable with the hard bits sounds fine to me.
No, wait, I've read it a bit more closely. It's all about Data warehousing. OK yeah, that's a data job.
One of the more confusing things is the branding. That job posting isn't for NHS England. Or NHS Digital, which doesn't exist any more.
Yeh, the structure is very very very confusing. Largely because you have the Hospital's themselves, then the trusts, then NHS England, or I guess now just the DHSC? And then occasionally even more layers in-between like health boards.
That and the fact that they rip it up and shake it all about every few years just to seem like they're doing something different.
The internal organisation and management of the NHS is horrible.
It is horrible to work for them and in fact in consulting as soon as you hear that the project is for the NHS people run and hide not to be assigned.