My understanding is that if you're working in tech at GCHQ, you're dealing with fossils—both your colleagues and the actual tech stack itself. Apparently any kind of meaningful change has to go through countless layers of scrutiny and review, taking weeks.

You also need to basically nuke your social media and lie to your friends and family on the regular. Which IMO effectively means you need to be thinking about your job 24/7, and therefore are working 24/7.

~£40k isn't even close to the low-water mark for an entry level job given all that IMO. If they want such a specialist skillset too, they're probably gonna need to add a zero if they actually want to attract anyone good.

There are even other parts of the government that don't have all that baggage and pay more.

There seems to be a race to the bottom when it comes to pay across all industries. These are wages from almost 30 years ago for a middle level IT person. In 1994 a typical high end IT manager for a national corporation was around £70k+.

Edit: I just remembered that in 1996 the company I worked for paid £1k per day for an external contractor to provide Unix and IP networking consultancy services to one staff member. That went on for five days per week for about a month at least. That staff member was on about £40k.

The same as most other industries then.

While they might need one, they surely don't look like they want one with that kind of payment offer.

Bruh. If anything they should pay extra for all the clearance one has to get as well. I love cyberchef, it's unironically a point of national pride for me, but something's got to give