Serious Techy Business Thread

Am I out of touch or is £50,000 a bit of a low salary for the head of cyber security at the treasury

I’m by no means high up but two of my line reports earn around this and they just sit on an incident queue all day.

It's a bit worrying that they see Head of Cyber Sec as a mid-level position too.

It'll be mid-level with a fancy title - definitely not in charge of cyber sec, more developing the policy. The SRO will be at least 3 grades higher.

I think there was discussion about it on HN and it transpired it was very much a case of title inflation.

But I love being Chief Design Futurologist Advocate | Leader | Individual Contributor | Always hustlin' yo

I also have a mate who is now "Expert GPU scientist for <company name>"

In our old job we were just HW Engineer.

Fairly standard in the CS. A bit of ownership but also with a good degree of cover. But you need to make it sound interesting to get people to actually apply...the job spec would have been clear it was not actually in charge of Cyber Sec.

We had a Product Manager leave a few months ago who was genuinely poor at her job. Within days she was filling LinkedIn with posts along the lines of "10 things you need to know as a Product Leader" and leaving comments under thought leader pieces etc. Just checked and of course for the last few weeks she's been resharing loads of AI guff.

I understand the need to make yourself look relevant on LinkedIn when you're job hunting, but be honest, if recruitment teams can't see past it, then they deserve each other.

We’re using it for white collar grunt work (summarise user research sessions, identify themes/insights etc.) and it’s at least as good as a £45k p/year research analyst.

I’ve seen it used to follow the double diamond design process from definition thro’ ideation and value measurement and it’s good enough that half my team should be shitting it / upping their game.

For anything remotely process based it’s a huge time and money saver if nothing else.

I've started to learn coding from scratch over the last few months and I think I've picked the worst time to do it.

There are good project managers?

Product Managers aren’t Project Managers.

I find most project managers decent, if they’ve gone through certification and actually have a process and methodology. It’s when you get the accidental project managers where they just wing it every time and lean too much on direct task management, assuming each individual is going to know and understand whatever arbitrary setup they’ve gone for. We’ve just standardized our pppm tools and it’s already paying dividends in identifying who really knows their stuff.

True that, on both counts.