
The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year - BerislavLopac
https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-the-biggest-job-in-tech-so-why-cant-they-find-anyone-to-do-it/
======
charlieflowers
Because it won't have any power. The person will just run around between
meetings preaching about the right way to do things, while everyone else in
the room rolls their eyes and ignores it.

The _main_ problem is not that the govt lacks the _knowledge_ about what to do
... it is that they lack the _will_ to do it.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Entirely this. Don't demand a competent practitioner with the illusion of
authority when you're hiring for a patsy to take the fall for failure to
deliver due to politics.

~~~
folkhack
Couldn't agree more with this statement.

Also, professionally, if you find yourself in this environment: GTFO
yesterday. It's toxic, and will take it's emotional toll over time. Especially
if you're technically talented there's always a market for your skill... keep
bouncing until you find a place that respects you as a professional/person.

~~~
sherlock_h
This comment really hits home with me. I took a job similar to the one
outlined, albeit in a political party and not government. It is taking an
emotional toll on me. Very difficult to get any work done and expectations to
perform are sky high. Difficult to do that though if you aren‘t allowed to....

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moomin
You know what? GOV.UK used to be an amazing team. I mean, seriously, some top
talent and a really productive team. They did a remarkable job of
understanding the art of the possible and writing clear guides that ordinary
people could understand.

And then the rest of the civil service and the government saw its brand
reputation as a resource to be used much the same way that slash and burn
farmers view the Amazon. Most of the great teams left. Much of their material
is still there, but it's not growing.

So yeah, that's why.

~~~
toyg
What I heard through the grapevine was that the end of the Coalition
government and Cameron’s resignation basically meant the GDS team lost their
protection.

~~~
moomin
That tracks. It was absolutely bizarre to watch a successful, apolitical
ongoing project like that get ruined.

------
BitwiseFool
I have _some_ experience with government IT (state and municipal, not
national). Anyone in this space knows that changing the bureaucracy
essentially requires a legislative or executive mandate. My team once got
intense push-back trying to change an extract file's date format from MMDDYY
to MMDDYYYY.

I suspect the person in this role won't have the power or authority to do
that. Clerks are notoriously protective of 'the process' and resist any
changes to it.

This honestly sounds like a miserable job and anyone who's actually worked in
this space would agree that this person has virtually no chance of succeeding.

~~~
sokoloff
If you're changing it anyway, why not push for YYYYMMDD?

~~~
BitwiseFool
That was my original request! But there are "readability" concerns with a
"non-standard" date format. I died a little inside when I heard those words.

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christkv
The job title should read. Person wanted as fall guy for Uk government when we
mess up any it project.

~~~
irrational
Maybe this is why so many high level positions include a golden parachute.

------
motohagiography
Having been through a few of these public sector transformations as a
consultant, there is no "there," from "here."

Strategically, the play for a few successive governments has been to stand up
new arms length agencies outside the public service proper that have missions
to develop new platforms, with the intent to migrate the public service to
them when they arrive.

The successes have been where the stand-alone agencies manage to deliver and
maintain their independence. The failures have been where they have become
captured by "secondments," where mandarins or "retired" ones leverage their
way into governance roles, subordinate them to the old system, and turn them
into the same broken and staid institutions they were designed to replace.

The successes were expensive but their success amortizes that cost. The
symptoms of the failed ones were visible early on, generally because of Party-
connected consulting firms owning the HR contracts for them and using them as
patronage factories and slush funds.

Change requires freedom, and that freedom requires independence. The
accountability risk is real, and the challenge with oversight was that the
overseers simply folded the agencies back into the morass.

If I were running this, I would take a radical approach, where the strategy
would be a venture model that micro-funded projects to create useful products
that solved for providing future services and applications, and not legacy
ones.

Priority one is a set of useful and privacy preserving identity services with
varying levels of assurance that meet the needs of regular people, not just
public servants, as all public servants are citizens first, so are
researchers, academics, police and everyone else. This must be exogenous and
adopted willingly, and not forced down as a national identity scheme. Second
would be an investment in FHE and other privacy technologies because they can
preclude and even obviate the need to stand up new private infrastructure to
support data exchange. Third, I would invest in federated and distributed
techs (git/BC/OIDC, etc) because interoperability is the ONLY problem
government is designed to solve well because fundamentally it is a
coordination and interoperability layer for society in everything it does.

While I am not qualified for this job, with a long enough lever, I have no
doubt I could move the whole thing.

~~~
g_p
> If I were running this, I would take a radical approach, where the strategy
> would be a venture model that micro-funded projects to create useful
> products that solved for providing future services and applications, and not
> legacy ones.

The above is more similar to some ideas being floated about in various halls
of government than you might think. That of course doesn't mean it will
happen, given the quirks of government.

> While I am not qualified for this job, with a long enough lever, I have no
> doubt I could move the whole thing.

I think your above insight and actually addressing some of the real issues and
opportunities shows you are (technically-speaking) well-qualified for the job.
Better than a lot of candidates, and better than anyone else that will take up
the post.

The fiefdoms in central government are very real, but there's a value to the
people who are able to navigate these, use rivalries to good effect, and
achieve the desired outcome by pitching everyone off against each other
correctly. Of course very different in a "CDO" role than as an outside
consultant coming in with a scoped brief of what needs achieved and which eggs
are able to be cracked in the process.

The sad part is that the whole system is such that you'll probably not want to
apply for the role, due to the highly politicised nature of most senior
appointments - you need to implement what an elected minister wants, even if
it doesn't make technical sense. The civil servants who are happy to project-
manage the blockchain-backed AI-enabled boondoggle (that lacks a ledger and
any form of ML) are the ones that survive.

~~~
motohagiography
Indeed, and thank you. The reason I have taken the startup and consulting
route is the intuition that these are upstream of the institutions, and this
is where I suspect a technically inclined individual can effect the most
change.

In the ~20y I've been around govt, arguably Linux, GitHub, Docker,
Jira/Atlassian, PowerBI, VMWare, LinkedIn, SalesForce, and even Twitter have
done more to transform government than any endogenous solution could. EVen in
the last 5 years, AirBNB and Uber have altered the economics of municipalities
faster than anything planned might have. These techs are all still in early
stages there, (and the economics of devops break public service finance, but
that's another story) but you can see the downstream effects they have.

So far regarding public services, my two favourite models have been In-Q-Tel
and 18f.gov. The first is far upstream, and the second has been a way to
navigate it. It's worth considering that a public sector CTO role is really a
"steady hand on the tiller" role to navigate the things we're all building
upstream. The CTO is a necessary role, but my experience is that heroes and
visionaries will likely select out fast, and framing it as a navigator role
might yield different results.

------
dotBen
The reality is that at £200k/y a suitably qualified person is taking a massive
pay-cut compared to what they could make in the private sector and so would
have to want to feel great deal of ideological or public service drive to take
this role on.

Gov.uk saw a great turnover of talent under the Tories (starting with the
Tory/Lib Dem coalition) as many people were simply disenfranchised/unaligned
with Tory rule but also felt equally uninspired at the prospect of a Corbin
government. Faced with no great outcome, people left.

Many qualified people in the private sector are going to pass, especially as
you probably can't also invest or sit on the boards of other companies and all
the other stuff tech execs do to further enhance their careers and wealth.

It is of no surprise to me they can't find suitably qualified folks to run
this, the pool size of the intersections above (ideologically aligned with
Tories, well qualified, open to pay cut) is minute.

And that's before you even consider the well made points in the other
comments; that this is probably a bit of a shit job in the first place.

~~~
ryandrake
I don't know--Ignoring the political ideology requirements, I'd guess far more
than half of HN have the technical chops to do the job, and far less than half
of HN make more than £200k/y.

~~~
dotBen
I've been in tech for 20 years from a software engineer through to founder, an
executive and now a VC... I know the type of people who do this job and I
don't think I'm suitably qualified.

My time at the BBC showed that public-service/civil-service tech leadership is
part people management, part political maneuvering, part vision and a small
dose of any actually tech experience. It's certainly more CIO not CTO.

------
Red_Leaves_Flyy
I second the sentiment of many comments here.

To use an analogy. Instead of trying to upgrade the engine in a model T to a
modern block, start over. Get a new office, get a small team to redesign the
workflow. Then test it live, handle the exact same workload as the existing
office and fix problems until everything mostly works. Give first dibs on the
permanent jobs to the folks from the old office. Hire for the rest and pray
you met budget. If you did start over with the next office. If not, you'll be
replaced shortly.

------
Apocryphon
Who will call app Britain?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9iM_zzzQk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei9iM_zzzQk)

~~~
w4tson
Perfect!

------
sjg007
Hmm.. maybe I will apply.. I think the thing a Chief Digital Officer would do
would be to map out each organizations data needs and mandate that their
product be provided via a SaaS interface to their customers and/or exportable
into something like Snowflake or Palantir or maybe a UK provider. Interfaces
are the first thing that Bezos mandated for AWS. The latter is probably more
risky politically but maybe there's a path there. It's a "we are moving to the
Cloud* approach". The APIs and the Snowflake style analysis will allow
enterprising organizations to refactor if they want and maybe develop new
applications without requiring data source team participation.

Frame it that way or another with the same goal, build out your own cloud team
to manage the project and then maybe you'd find success.

~~~
ionwake
Well said. I’m going to cut and paste this in my application.

~~~
sjg007
Sure, go ahead, but I would advise you to rephrase it in your own words.
Otherwise you run the risk of rejection due to a few Google searches!! But..
none of this is special sauce, this is the playbook for every "scalable"
organization. I would avoid the word "interoperability" though. That's
verbiage from the last major IT/govt push.

~~~
ionwake
I was mostly joking though I’ll consider applying for fun

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>the UK is recruiting a Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO), who will be
working at the highest levels of the Cabinet Office to lead the digital
transformation of public services in the country. All of this and more, for
£200,000 a year.

Maybe the reason they can't find anyone to do this is that they are
underpaying for the position. The responsibilities described sound at least at
the level of a Senior VP, if not higher, at a large tech company. Those
positions typically pay more than 10x that compensation. In addition, being in
government comes with its own unique set of headaches and scrutiny that people
in the private sector would not have.

~~~
armagon
That's a quarter million USD per year.

You are telling me that senior VPs make 2.5 million USD each year?

~~~
fatnoah
Absolutely. Director levels at many large tech companies certainly earn > $1M,
even before stock appreciation.

~~~
user5994461
Not in the UK though.

~~~
fatnoah
True, that's a good point.

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disown
Well they should add it to the HN monthly "Who's hiring" thread. Are americans
eligible for this position or is it just for british citizens?

------
f0ok
After being open for so long, it's not a position nor a job. It's just
publicity. Might as well get a Chief Morale Officer.

------
rdiddly
I remember seeing it advertised, being interested, following the link, reading
it, and eventually wandering off suddenly having no interest whatsoever. Don't
remember what it was about it exactly, but obviously they should take pains to
fix or at least conceal whatever it is in their recruitment materials that is
making the job seem like hell on earth.

------
WoefullyInept
This is the equivalent of accepting minimum wage for being CEO of a S&P 500
company, blindfolded and without a steering wheel.

~~~
vkou
> minimum wage for being CEO of a S&P 500 company, blindfolded and without a
> steering wheel

I'd personally take that job offer in a heartbeat (And would recommend anyone
else to do so as well), because I'd have ~50/50 odds of failing upwards or
downwards.

Heads, I win, and my next job would be the C-whatever of a S&P 500 company for
real wages.

Tails, I lose, and my next job would be the C-whatever of a Fortune 5000
company, also for real wages.

~~~
WoefullyInept
You'd take it because you're not qualified to do it. And neither am I. Anyone
that would meet their expectations of experience would already be working in
the C suite at another company for significantly more.

~~~
vkou
Well, sure, that's the reason why the CDO position isn't being filled.

But the parent poster I was responding to was painting it as a terrible job. I
was pointing out that for those of us that don't have the privilege of being
in the C-level of the Fortune 500 club (Which is, to some approximation, some
large number of nines of the userbase of HN), this sort of job would actually
be pretty good, not because of what you do in it, but because of the doors it
opens.

I've seen too many political animals fail upward from one disaster to another
to imagine that there's nothing career-boosting that can be salvaged from that
job posting.

------
spaced-out
>"All of this and more, for £200,000 a year."

Question for the Brits here: how long would it take someone making this
salary, and supporting a family, to afford the down payment to a reasonably
sized house within 1/2 hour of where they would be working (which I assume is
central London)?

~~~
djhworld
£200k a year you'll be very comfortable, and could probably get a mortgage on
a £1million house depending on your deposit (downpayment)

~~~
toyg
A £1m house sounds big, but in central London that’s... not really big at all.

I guess it depends on expectations.

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throwaway_dcnt
200K is base. The taxes on this wage are hefty in UK. The monthly takehome is
less than 10K.

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blululu
>>"All of this and more, for £200,000 a year."

Unless the British Government is giving out some windfall of equity this is
the compensation package of a mid level software engineer at FAANG. For anyone
remotely qualified for this kind of job it is an absurd pay cut. Given this
budget I would suspect that the department will also be asked to hire staff at
salaries that are well below market rates. In other words the position is set
up to fail and a simple google search could have shown as much.

~~~
pjc50
It's more than the PM's official salary. It's almost as much as he was paid
for a ten hours a week journo sinecure. [https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/ex-
foreign-secretary-boris-jo...](https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/ex-foreign-
secretary-boris-johnson-paid-275000-annual-salary-for-ten-hours-a-month-
writing-weekly-telegraph-column/)

~~~
cannam
> It's more than the PM's official salary

I remember going to a party in west London at the time of the MPs' expenses
scandal
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_parliamentary_e...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_parliamentary_expenses_scandal)
\- remember when this was our biggest news?) and listening to people saying
things like "well it's no wonder they claim for all this stuff, you can't live
in London on 60K" (roughly an MP's salary at the time).

I was just amazed by that - as a member of the shiny technological elite I
thought of £60K as a pretty fat wedge. Still do really. I think here, and in
Europe generally, software people are usually paid as ordinary office workers
who happen to have some useful skill, not as transformative irreplaceable
self-governing magicians.

Seeing that this job pays £200K actually makes me wonder for a moment if I
shouldn't apply myself. I could do two or maybe three years at that salary and
never have to work again.

