Not surprising...
All else being equal, if someone came along and offered you significantly more money at another job, I doubt many here would turn it down...
HMRC IT chief Mark Dearnley walked away from his £185,000-a-year job because the private sector paid better, MPs heard yesterday. Speaking at a Commons public accounts committee hearing on Wednesday, Jon Thompson, chief executive of the UK tax body, was asked why Dearnley quit his role, which involved overseeing the agency's …
Um, "All else being equal" is rather unlikely, at least in a role more interesting than Dogsbody. In real life, how many of us have never taken a pay cut to do something more interesting, or to improve work/life balance, or somesuch? I was very happy to take a cut from £17k to £13k to move from pointless industry[1] in a boring location to interesting academic research in a location I loved.
(funnily enough I'm back on minimum wage today, and I wouldn't change it for £185k if the latter required me to move to London - where the £185k jobs are).
[1] No I wouldn't claim industry in general was pointless. Some of it is.
But of course some of the other factors are job satisfaction and how you feel about your employers and their business.
Would you go and do an interesting job helping to make bombs for export to Saudi Arabia even if they paid you five times your present salary? I wouldn't.
In general it's good to have people working for the public sector who actually believe in what they are doing (yes, even collecting tax can actually be a good thing), and who see their job as a form of public service. So long as they are competent those are the people we want, the ones happy to do a good and worthwhile job for a sufficient salary, rather than just chase the cash so they can buy ever more expensive trinkets.
its not surprising because he's got the best of both worlds
I suspect his current role was about to be comes highly embarrasing due to failed projects and blown budgets, and his head would be on the block. So rather than deal with that - or even attempt to salvage the situation , because it looks it looks tricky - better to jump ship and get a plush new job leaving that mess behind for someone else to clean up and/or take the heat.
if you can get paid more at the same time great - out of the frying pan , into the , er , better paid , cooler pan thing .. metaphor wearing thin ... alert ...
> he's bailing before anyone realises just what a problem that is.
Would you care to explain what sort of problem that might be? Privacy? Interoperability? Availability?
I've only the experience of moving my personal domain's email from my own server to Google mail (more than 5 years ago) and it saved me a lot of grey hair.
(If it's a problem with security you anticipate, you can relax. Due to The Special Relationship, we have no secrets from our American cousins.)
I wonder if he's truly an employee of the new "employer" or if he's contracted for his consultancy services through an intermediary...
Probably the self same big name Accountancy and Consulting firms who will be the only ones left to supply contract staff once they've advised the government on wiping out the little guy through IR35.
Maybe if HMG used some of the pivate sector golden handcuffs concepts of terminal bonus for success, no competition clauses to avoid anyone jumping ship to other companies competing in the same space; or some way of stopping gamekeepers becoming poachers.
All of this being made 100% crystal clear at the interview.. OK it migh cost us more but at least we would have people who are prepared to stay the course.
"no competition clauses to avoid anyone jumping ship to other companies competing in the same space"
Governments tend to treat taxation as a monopoly*. There are no companies competing with HMRC, at least not within the UK.
*Note that they don't achieve this when it comes to taxation of multi-national companies.