>And I cannot use this public transport offer. But I am contributing to it with my taxes.
Not all government subsidies, benefits, etc are supposed to help everybody equally, this should not be a hard concept to grasp and yet comments like yours are so common that it makes me think that people don't really understand how taxes and government spending works.
Enterprise architect at £50-60k per year seems like a role that has been put on the jobs website to provide evidence that it cannot be filled and thus can go to a service company rather than an honest expectation of getting any realistic candidates
I don't know about that particular role, but I can say that many people work in public service knowing full well they could probably double their salary in the private sector, but do it anyway. Mainly because of the large amount of annual leave and a pension that is unbeatable in the private sector, but also the opportunity to do really interesting work in genuinely unique environment, rather than work for another food delivery startup.
While I understand that some people want to work in public service because they find the kind of work more meaningful; I think those reasons are a bit weak.
From what I can see, the annual leave for these roles is 30 days per year, this is nice but 25 days is pretty standard in most tech jobs in the UK, with some employers allowing you to sacrifice salary in exchange for more days (+ or - 5 days in exchange for equivalent days of salary)
I know the pension plan for civil service is particularly good, but I wonder how it compares in terms of actual pension pay with having worked for big tech and contribute part of a salary that is, as you said, probably double – plus company contributions or matching which can be quite high (5-10%). Also, the RSUs you get and yearly refreshers kinda become your pension plan for a lot of tech workers.
Life isn't all about money, but for most people money is the primary reason to choose one company over another.
Then I would suggest the public sector probably isn't for you, which is fine! But clearly, many people do enjoy working there and are quite happy with a lower salary.
The fact that we struggle massively to recruit people and that there are teams with a majority of contractors would suggest that perhaps there aren't enough people willing to look at the tradeoffs and maybe higher salaries would deliver better value for the tax payer ( we get paid a lot less than contractors)
Obviously anecdotal evidence regarding the above but still
I am a civil servant and while it's technically true that I could double my pay in the private sector, I would likely be on the top 1 percentile or higher.
I'd guess that salary is on the bottom 10 percentile for enterprise architects.
Edit
Pension is a good reason too, it is my main reason :)
Clicking through shows it to be on the low-end of that range, too, at £50,870. While I work in government UX and appreciate there's a level of serving one's country and fellow constituents, that is simply not enough salary to recruit a highly-qualified individual. Especially considering government services are under constant attack by nation-state threat actors, we should be hiring the best individuals to protect parliament.
I guess they use something like "duty" or "shift plan".
Rota is indeed very British. It clearly comes from the Latin word for "wheel", but in Italy it is not used (nor in France, afaik) - we have the Sacra Rota (which is the Catholic ecclesiastical tribunal, typically invoked for marriage dissolutions) and the word rotazione which is "rotation" and can indeed be used to indicate shift planning. Now I wonder if "rota" in that context comes as a shortening of rotation...
> On a side note the performance thing seems to be a myth to me.
I've always thought about the performance advantages as more related to how (FP) allows for easy parallelisation as your functions are pure, no mutability, etc .
Yes F# could be faster than C# but the compiler is missing some advanced optimisations. Right now you can do those by hand but often the code will read like C# once you are done.
I wonder if a FP compiler should actuall be able to produce faster code than for imperative style: imho knowing intention and context could lead do far superior optimizations (for loop with var for summing vs. List.sum)
Yes it definitely can! The most important optimisation (imo) is to replace pure code on immutable data-structures with imperative code on mutable data-structures.
Why not just write imperative code? Because it’s really hard to reason about.
>Everyone I know, me included, just uses debit cards for purchases everywhere including Amazon.
This is just as anecdotal as GP or indeed myself. I never use a debit card and don't know anybody that uses them other than for getting cash out of an ATM
How old are you? People using credit cards in my circle (early 30s, London) are firmly the minority. If we split a bill in a restaurant it's all debit cards. Maybe there's one person with an amex or something.
Do you check everyone's card when you split the bill? What makes you think the others are debit rather than credit cards?
For info: the debit & credit cards from my bank look almost identical. The only difference is one says "credit" in small black text. My credit card handles exactly like my debit card in terms of tap-and-pay etc. I just wouldn't use it to take out cash from an ATM, but then I can't remember when I last needed to do that.
Not all government subsidies, benefits, etc are supposed to help everybody equally, this should not be a hard concept to grasp and yet comments like yours are so common that it makes me think that people don't really understand how taxes and government spending works.