Yeah, paywise you could get more working for some bank etc in the private sector and my first job working for Eastern ELectricity Board saw me on a £3k salary a year (1983), left and tripled that.
When I worked for the BBC (2002) I was on £42k a year, official title was DBA, though did more non DBA work and was at a level in which I could tell the top people my views and what needed to be done and they listened.
Thing is in tech, it's not what you're paid per year, it's how many hours you work for that pay a year. Could have a £50k job and work 9-5 or a £50k job and end up cutting 80 hours weeks all the time. Details like that are never reflected in the salary.
And how good the work is. In the Beeb, I worked on interesting projects, for a worthy cause, using a tech stack chosen collectively by the team. Many of the projects instigated by the team, rather than pushed on to us from elsewhere.
Since leaving, a lot of the work I have done has been boring and predetermined.
I might add - the pay has got much worse since you were there. The collective pay increase was 1% most years, which also applied to the banding so would have affected new hires as well. Since 2011, the pension has been no better than in any other organisation.
When I worked for the BBC (2002) I was on £42k a year, official title was DBA, though did more non DBA work and was at a level in which I could tell the top people my views and what needed to be done and they listened.
Thing is in tech, it's not what you're paid per year, it's how many hours you work for that pay a year. Could have a £50k job and work 9-5 or a £50k job and end up cutting 80 hours weeks all the time. Details like that are never reflected in the salary.