Re: Dangers of moving from outside to inside IR35
I beg to differ with you on one point:
>It's simply not appropriate for a company to pay someone a board-level salary for doing a mid-level-management job.
It's perfectly appropriate to pay skilled staff more than board members in the right situation. Management is a skill set in exactly the same way that IT is, there are zero logical reasons why a very skilled IT person should not be paid more than an unskilled or semi-skilled manager.
The idea that managers have to be paid more than their staff is a completely artificial construct perpetuated by the fact that those making the salary decisions are often incapable of putting their own ego aside.
Many years ago I worked for one of the large consultancies and had to put together a team of SAN engineers (just as SAN usage started to take off) and I was paid ~£20k less than several of the people i my team because that was the going rate. It didn't bother me and fortunately the company understood what they needed to pay to get the staff they wanted.
Not long after that, while working for another large company who took your view, we were unable to even get an applicant for a senior DBA role in two years because they were offering £25-30k under the market rate. I wish this was an isolated incident, but I know from talking to others that it's not and it's *always* someone higher up the food chain saying "I'm not paying someone who works for me more than I'm on".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
