Last time i checked
The money was crap
Blighty's surveillance and security agency GCHQ is facing significant challenges in meeting the government's targets for recruitment over the next four years. Last year the chancellor promised that 1,900 new recruits would be hired by the intelligence agencies by 2020 – with the lion's share expected to head to GCHQ in …
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Many years ago I considered applying to the Bude "station", but was informally told that even though they'd dropped the "must be a UK-born citizen of UK citizens, also UK-born" requirement from their public recruitment advertising (due to equality legislation), in practice, there was no way in hell anyone else would ever get a look-in.
yep the money will be as shit as any other civil service IT job. And to add to that the pension (still pretty good) but has been shafted, incremental pay increases (normally for 3 first years) have gone, promotion is very difficult to get. Yep all sounding great.
Had an email this morning from HR to say that we won't be getting our 2015 1% pay rise until June 2016 at the earliest so just a year late then! as we're meant to get them in July
Remind me what those other public sector workers got as a pay rise...........
Oh yeah 11%
I had an "informal" interview there a few years ago. When we eventually got around to talking about pay I nearly fell off my chair laughing, commenting something like "You have to be fcuking joking! That's just over half of what I get from my present tight-arsed employer. Thank you for wasting half a day of my life - goodbye."
The interviewer was most unimpressed.
"yep the money will be as shit as any other civil service IT job."
Yep, here you go....
http://www.indeed.co.uk/cmp/Gchq/salaries
"Remind me what those other public sector workers got as a pay rise...........Oh yeah 11%"
That was just the politicians (and the high ranking civil servants they needed to bribe to shut them up about it). No actual member of the workforce (Actual IT people, clerks, nurses, council workers etc.) got that rise, or anything like it. In fact, most of the civil service just took a small pay hit with the adjustment to NI paid by public sector workers.
>Last time i checked the money was crap
Indeed. But that's what:
"however pay and reward packages for staff at the intelligence agencies are under regular review to ensure that what can be offered reflects both the unique challenges the agencies face, and the high level of ability and skill required to meet them."
means.
If you can't translate that it into English - "we don't pay much, so we try to select people who are a bit gullible and easily flattered" - a career in the civil service is not for you.
Hello GCHQ, I know we don't always see eye to eye. I don't like your sock-puppets and complain about it, you sent a virus laden email to my ten-year old kid (apparently from CBBC, from a real BBC.co.uk IP addr) in the hope of breaking-in to my networks. Hope you enjoyed the lulz.
But maybe this will help, after all I always continue to believe in defending the UK against cyber-armageddon etc etc.
Consider Estonia who similarly tried to recruit loads of cyber warriors from privy-street. They couldn't get enough, even tho' Estonia is stuffed with advanced cyber kids and everything is online there.
In the end, they just introduced a mash-up of sunday-soldiers and a bit of a draft/reserve list of experts who - whilst they wouldn't work in the Estonian Fusion centre 24/7 - were prepared to participate for the odd weekend, or even a week at peak times/special operations. Now allegedly they are fully staffed with their volunteer rota. The amazingly professional GCHQ training that you could give the UK volunteers would also be great for defending civil/industrial infrastructure. Win Win!
(alternatively in USA they are simply re-training Navy retirees as offensive/defensive cyberwarriors as they are RIF'fed, do we have enough soon to be ex-forces to do that?)
greetings to the team!
Putting puzzles on social media & seeing who solves them is a little transparent too.
They are going to monitor the winners for the rest of their lives if they refuse the job offer that's fairly obviously going to come at the end.
Apparently if you're smart enough to solve the puzzles, you're too stupid to see the trap.
However they dress it up.
I wonder if the story from a while back, about the FBI giving career talks in schools to try and stop techies having the odd toke is relevant here ? The issue being there was a shortage of toke-free techies when it came to recruitment.
The sort where you are paid £X irrespective of how good you are or what you do.
But after 3 years you can be promoted to Intermediate Science Officer ( lower grade ( type B ( sub section III)) [class 2b] and receive a 3% pay rise, unless a future government introduces a pay freeze.
But after 3 years you can be promoted to Intermediate Science Officer
But only if you pass the selection panel. And (certainly when I threw my rattle out of the pram and left) that involved three self important knob ends asking questions about their particular specialism, and anybody outside that little circle would know somewhere between little or nothing about the topic.
But that's the great thing about the civil service - it can proudly boast of its recruitment and retention policies "we do not discriminate on the grounds of ability".
as well as getting rid of our progression points they sneaked in a change to the pay on promotion that you would get (in the unlikely event of gaining merit promotion that is) You used to get a 10% pay rise, now changed to 5%. 5 fecking % not even worth getting promoted for!
I think they suffer from the safe problem as parliament - the people that are keen to join are the least suited to the role.
The government used to have a list of people with skills crtical to the maintenance of the post-apocalypse regime who would be taken at gunpoint (lest they prefer to be with their families in their last moments) to the nearest bunker in the event of an imminent nuclear attack. In the aftermath of the FBI-Apple battle and the extraordinary obligations of RIPA, I wonder how long it will be before people with specialist skills find themselves similarly obliged to assist our dear leaders.
If it's like elements of the MOD and such there are some good people there, but I get the impression they are hampered by the civil servants, and the more politic playing officers. Some of them aren't exactly fans of the level of spying either, even when they work in some of those branches.
The police have just announced that they are planning to deal with drug violence here by:
Introducing a zero tolerance policy (where they arrest youths of a certain skin color for walking on the cracks in the pavement) and simultaneously "earning the trust of the community" to get people to help them by turning in the naughty people.
Ahem. They do have other grounds, loitering with intent to use a level crossing, urinating in a public convenience, looking at the police in a funny way, walking in a loud shirt, and walking around with an offensive wife are all grounds for suspicion.
everyone who posts on this forum is already on a watchlist
You think GCHQ have the technical ability to find and read the Reg forums? I've no doubt they're scraping and storing the content along with the rest of the petabytes added to the web each day, but actually read, understand, adapt? No way.
Obviously if you've been ordering a lot of bleach, nails and fertiliser from Amazon then they'll pick you out and follow all you do including any Reg posts you make, and then present them as evidence in your court case: "M'lud, when the defendant posted "GCC beats MS VC, but LLVM is a dog", this was a code that meant his operatives should kill the prime minister."
You think GCHQ have the technical ability to find and read the Reg forums?
Er... you might notice TheReg website is entirely unencrypted, even though they've been repeatedly asked to provide HTTPS. Using HTTPS on TheReg bounces you back to the unencrypted form.
Do you think that's accidental?
Nah - tried something like that a few years ago -
Iron oxide, aluminium powder and magnesium ribbon all ordered in the space of 5 mins through ebay.
No knock on the door - other than the postie - the iron oxide jiffy wouldnt fit therough the letterbox.
Luckily the post time meant I sobered up before removing the tree stump next to the fence with the thermite....