alt Hacker NewsThe problem is that the civil service is inefficient and will bloat, because the only pressure on it to not is the individual good practice of leaders. There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.
I agree that GDS is a good thing, and I interviewed with them a few years ago and was impressed, but there is always the risk of bloat. I wish this could be fixed. I have some ideas about a similar concept in the NHS that would require the government hiring well-paid software engineers.
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What you wrote has nothing to do with what the parent wrote.
>There's no competitive/market pressure on it to naturally cap spending based on value.
The parent is specifically claiming gov jobs don't allow for near market rates. That number would literally be formulated by current market pressures. If that goes lower in the private sector it will go lower in the gov sector.
For your point to be correct with respect to their specific example, you would have to claim the gov could pay £300k/year when the going market rate was £100k/year and there would be no pressure to prevent this. Whereas all it would take would be someone to ask why a run-of-the-mill programmer is getting paid 3x the market rate?
> there is always the risk of bloat
The fantasy lies in ignoring the same risk when it's happening in a private sector contractor, doing the same job for objectively much higher costs.