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cpswan
I've often wondered about the sucky pay issue - particularly for those working in London. I can only hope/guess that there are some benefits like subsidised housing that make these roles tenable.
pointyhat
You will get nothing at all.

You can just about survive in London on that.

strawberryshake
If it's anything like the MoD, you'd get lots of holiday, and generous expense systems
pointyhat
Good for employees but when a contractor, you're lucky not to have to sue them :(
EdwardQ
Subsidised housing? More like a brothel in Pimlico.
pointyhat
That's pretty standard for postgrad salaries in the UK in the public sector. The various agencies aren't high payers.

You will get pretty much no help from anyone including social or subsidised housing so you'll be stuck in a flat share or a crap rental.

You'll get a worthless pension though.

Go private sector!

michaelaiello
The questionnaire to "to assess your suitability for a role" as an "IT Security Exploitation Officer" is actually pretty good.

https://www.mi5.gov.uk/careers/it-security-test-your-knowled...

You enter the following string into an application:

    "AAAAAAAAAAAABBBBCCCCCDDDD"
The program crashes with a message:

    "Access violation executing 0x43434343"
a) This is likely to be an example of what sort of security vulnerability?

b) How might this leave a machine vulnerable to code execution?

c) This appears to relate to the use of the strcpy function. What improvements might you suggest the developer add?

d) Running this application on newer operating system results in different behaviour. Why?

corin_
The systems admin ones are crazily basic:

On a Linux server what command line tools might you use to perform the following functions?

a) view the firewall configuration

b) format a partition using the ext3 filesystem

c) viewing the configuration of the eth0 network interface

d) unpack the file archive.tar

e) create a symlink

Powerscroft
You get what you pay for. How can they expect to get commitment and security on those sort of wages? How can they expect someone to resist a little temptation / extortion when they are paid breadlien wages? It is an insult. The majority of IT workers are unerpaid, but this is ridiculous.