
Hays email blunder exposes high RBS contractor pay rates - Netadmin
http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3298971/hays-email-blunder-exposes-high-rbs-contractor-pay-rates/
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ilcavero
The only outrage here is that a tax-payer funded entity is outraged because
its payroll details were leaked. Don't I have the right to know how my taxes
are spent? (supposing I was Scottish)

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arethuza
The whole of the UK bailed RBS out (not to mention HBOS).

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arethuza
I'm willing to bet that the contractor getting paid £2000 a day was probably
updating their Hyperion HFM rules - a black art if there ever was one.

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ra
For a consultant who offers professionalism, experience and a truly in-demand
or rare set of skills, 2k / day isn't anything out of the ordinary.

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Silhouette
For software contractors, in the UK, 2k/day would not only be out of the
ordinary, it would be about twice what I've previously heard of _anyone_
getting, and that includes a few people who work for the kinds of project that
traditionally pay serious money: banking in the City, defence with
clearances/specialist skills, etc. etc.

The article doesn't say who is getting those rates, but if it's the software
guys then I'm guessing we're talking about a very small number of isolated
cases, where probably either someone had them over a barrel with knowledge of
a critical project that was otherwise going to be lost or someone knew where
the skeletons were buried. Either way, management made the expensive screw up
a long time ago...

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arethuza
Hyperion HFM rules are both fairly logically complex (manipulation of 12
dimensional data), usually associated with fairly arcane financial
requirements that only apply to large companies and, as a final wonderful
touch, implemented as dirty great lumps of ulta-conditional VBScript.

This is not a pleasant combination.

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Silhouette
> as a final wonderful touch, implemented as dirty great lumps of ulta-
> conditional VBScript.

Sounds like the people implementing them don't deserve £200/day, never mind
£2,000! :-)

Seriously, though, nothing you wrote there sounds particularly impressive when
you look at what plenty of very smart, very skilled, very well trained
contractors do for daily rates in three figures.

I'd guess that in the UK today, the middle of the bell curve for software
contracting rates is probably in the £30-£50/hour or £250-400/day region. With
specialist skills/relevant experience you can get higher, and in London you
generally shift everything upwards a bit as well, so for something like
banking in the City you might be looking at £600-800/day. Even in London, in a
generally high-paid industry, with specialist skills and experience, you're
still an outlier if you're approach £1,000/day though.

I know absolutely nothing about Hyperion HFM rules, but I find it hard to
believe anything could be so difficult to learn and work with that you
couldn't get someone capable of doing those other jobs to learn it and do it
for half the rate we're talking about. Is there some sort of artificial
barrier that stops otherwise capable software contractors from moving into the
field?

[Edit: The PCG's benchmark report from June this year had the middle of the
curve around £300-500/day or £60k-100k turnover, with the middle of the
respondents curve around ages 35-55 and IT making up the majority of responses
and fitting the turnover curve pretty well when isolated. That's based on
self-selected respondents who are members of a professional organisation, and
certainly tending to the more experienced age ranges, so I think it's fairly
consistent with my guess above. They did indicate a small number of responses
with turnover above £200k, and even some with turnover in the £300k-500k
range. There is no way to tell whether those correspond to the respondents
whose businesses had more than one fee earner (10% of the total).]

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arethuza
You _have_ to use VBScript - that's what Hyperion expects.

I think the main barrier is that you need to be a competent developer (mod
working in VBScript) _and_ know a hell of a lot about financial consolidation
_and_ know about how Hyperion is typically implemented in organisations.

It's those combination of skills that I suspect is pretty rare and if you
don't have the domain and application knowledge then no amount of technical
skills is likely to compensate.

Believe me - my respect for accountants has gone _way_ up since I've been
involved in integrating with HFM. I wouldn't dream of working on the guts of
it - although we did build a reporting engine on top of the beast that is
orders of magnitude better than what it comes with!

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mattmillr
"We are working with RBS to recover the data from recipients where possible."

Is there some business or legal necessity for making statements like this?
When I've got my geek hat on, this seems like an incredibly stupid statement
that betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of data. What am I
missing?

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ig1
I thought that as well, it's pretty poor journalism that a technology magazine
didn't pick up on that. But saying that it's pretty bad journalism anyway in
that they're using an extreme data point and implying it was representative of
the entire data set when it obviously isn't.

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perfunctory
I wonder how much of those £2,000 went to actual contractors, after the agency
margin that is.

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whyleyc
Does anyone know if the source email has been posted anywhere on the InterWebs
?

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Powerscroft
In house IT staff are getting made redundant while this is going on.
Contractors deserve to get what the market will pay - but it doesn't say much
about planning and skills development at RBS does it.

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ig1
Contracting staff don't tend to cost companies much more than direct employee
staff (the difference is typically <20%) - the big difference is that
companies have to provide employees benefits,national insurance, pensions,
holidays, sick pay, bonuses etc whereas for contractors they just get the
monetary equivalent.

At RBS this is particularly significant as they have some of the best non-
financial employee benefits in the financial sector.

The ability to hire/fire contractors at will makes the 20% premium well worth
it for companies, especially when those skills are only need for a short time
period or for particular projects.

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arctangent
It probably looks good on paper for companies but there are often some hidden
pitfalls.

Firstly, the options appraisal around whether to increase headcount or to get
in a "temporary" consultant are highly sensitive to estimates about how long a
piece of work will take to do and how much ongoing support would be required
afterwards. If the estimates are optimistic then it might actually have made
more sense to hire a permanent employee.

Secondly, there is often a motivation hit when contractors are brought in. If
the contractor is brought in solely to increase a team's capacity (rather than
to bring in skills that a team lacks) then the permanent members of staff will
be all too aware that the person sitting at the next desk is making twice as
much (or more!) for doing the exact same job.

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ig1
Even if you're using contractors on a long term basis the premium can be worth
it if you're in industry which goes through contractions so you can get rid of
staff when you want to. Like I said the actually premium is relatively small
for companies, and it's much easier to replace a contractor with a employee
than vice versa if you need to.

I've worked at a few companies with mixed contractor/employee teams where it
hasn't been an issue, after all there's nothing stopping the employees from
becoming contractors if they prefer that lifestyle and it aligns with their
long term goals.

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bankingtech
The rates of £2k per day are most likely for finance workers in the front or
middle office – these are not tech contractors. Nowhere in the article does it
state that they are anything to do with the technology department. From that
perspective, £2k per day is a less surprising figure given that the permanent
staff in these areas can easily earn £300k - £500k + depending on the role.

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MortenK
It might very well be tech contractors. For people with specialized skills
(not your typical .NET, PHP, RoR guy) who contract on stuff like SAP or
similar, it is definitely not unheard of, to have a rate of £2K for a 8 hour
working day. Especially not if you are in the banking / financial services
sector.

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forgotAgain
_“We are working with RBS to recover the data from recipients where
possible.”_

How exactly do you recover emailed data?

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a3camero
Delete it from people's mailboxes on Exchange? Some people maybe don't check
their email frequently...

I'm not saying it isn't a stupid comment but there's probably a bit of a
reason for why they said that.

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tlianza
Assuming this wasn't some sort of kickback, doesn't the willingness to pay
contractors £2k per day while shedding full-timers suggest that there is
something absolutely crippling about the terms for full time employment?

Is it regulation?

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ig1
I imagine at that price point either:

1) The skill set is rare enough that the only choice for the company is to
hire a contractor

2) The company only needs the skill-set for a short period of time, i.e it
doesn't make sense to hire someone who'll cost 300k/year when you only really
need them for three months

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gte910h
2000 pounds a day (for say, a 12 hour day) would come out to about $273 USD an
hour.

That's not inconceivable, especially for a non-technical business contractor.

