And was he then confused and flustered when the deletion stubs cascaded on and binned the docs from his mailstore?

Met Office denies Hopkin's £90k salary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6743877.stm

The Sun reported on Syed Amed's elaborations. You'll have to find the full story yourself - here's the DS report:
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/a2958...eam-world.html

Badger admitted being part of the team, rather than solely responsible for the bottom line profit of the co. she worked for, in the actual show when she was quizzed during the interview process.

I think Claire's bonus is feasible. She is not in sales. Outside sales roles and City jobs manager bonuses are usually based around a %age of salary; and it is very difficult to achieve your full bonus. If Claire was on 85k basic, then her bonus could represent 100% achievement against a 25% opportunity. Feasible, but very unusual - i.e. only achieved when the manager has done something pretty extraordinary.

The interviewer obviously assumed she was on a sales model of bonus structure where the bonus is typically commission on the sale - bigger the sale, bigger the bonus.

It might have been more helpful for her if she had said something like: 'I was one of only x people in the company to achieve a 100% rating against my bonus objectives last year, due to the 8m deal....'

I agree with you. I'm a junior manager and my bonus is 10% of my salary if I hit target, and 15% if I hit stretch target.

the best bit about the salaries...when in the boardroom, Lucinda said she would have to move down paygrades to take the job...anybody catch the look Claire gave her??

It was priceless.

Best bit of the whole show, she was truly shocked wasn't she.

I'd say it was a look of disbelief

Sorry but there seems to be some confusion here.

I don't think Lucinda ""Computers are not my thing" Ledgerwood is an IT business analyst as has been suggested by some posters. There is no way that an IT business analyst would not be able to use a computer competently. I say this from experience. I'm in a senior role in that area and would not recruit someone who did not have competent IT skills.

Lucinda is a risk analyst (see BBC web site) which is a more financially oriented role. This is a completely different job.
I think this is sometimes alternatively referred to as a business analyst (terminology can be very loose sometimes)

Quote from wikipedia: "Risk management is a structured approach to managing uncertainty related to a threat, through a sequence of human activities including: risk assessment, strategies development to manage it, and mitigation of risk using managerial resources. " This fits in with the fact that Lucinda has Financial Advisor exams as part of her experience.
Last edited by Vivacious Lady : 06-06-2008 at 20:44

The figures would suggest 30% extra which looks a round number. The civil service equivalent performance bonus used to be about 3%...........

They should look for apprentices who actually need the job.

People on those huge salaries I don't believe want to work in Sirallun's organisation - they just want to be on the telly.

I think she is more risk anaylis, as someoe mentioned above, because I remember SAS askin Lucinda to work out the risk of her being fired, and was not satisfied with the answer of 1/3 - he could not work out how she earnt money!

The BBC says, "she began her career in Risk Management before undertaking various roles involving I.T. in the financial sector." What would you think "I.T." means here? Obviously she's not doing tech support or anything like that, but I'd have thought she could use Office apps and printing stuff.

(I reckon now that the photo task had a technical problem which was shear bad luck. It only happened to one team and the production crew should have made sure it didn't happen at all. And if it hadn't happened, we'd have a much more positive view of Helene (and Lucinda).)

Thanks for the reference. It doesn't say what she was earning. Maybe Katie just rounded it up to the nearest 10k, or maybe she cited what the pay would have been had she completed her probation. I think if it had been hugely wrong it would have come up in interview.

Indeed. I work in an investment bank and know for a fact that many of our consultants change anything up to £2k a day, with £1k being about average. Most of them sign up for 6-12 month contracts at a time then take time out between. It's obviously a high risk of being out of work which is why pay is so great.

You're quite right. I missed the next sentence. Maybe I subconsciously blotted it out because I couldn't believe it. I've worked in IT for many many years now and I've never met anyone whose computer skills appear to be so deficient - technical problem or not. Even those who work purely in the back office and only use MS Office are reasonably proficient. Why is she in IT if she doesn't like computers? It's like someone working in the fashion industry saying they don't like clothes very much.

Maybe she does something around assessing and mitigating the risks of implementing new IT systems. I'd have still expected some computing knowledge to do this properly.
Last edited by Vivacious Lady : 07-06-2008 at 18:53

It wouldn't come up in the interview as the BBC would not be privy to their salary details. A company would not disclose such data. She was probably still on good money, just not quite £90k.

I agree with you - but the word 'apprentice' is a real misnomer here. Poor old Simon would have been an ideal apprentice imho, but when SAS fired him, he said something like "I don't think I'd want you running one of my portfolios" - hardly a job for an 'apprentice'!

The ones left who really need the job are Alex and Lee - but what's the betting Clare will get it?

I'd love to know where you can apply for an £85k a year job and get it at 28.

TBH that sort of job isn't applied for - you get head-hunted.

But even if you started at 16 in a sales job, you'd have to be ****-hot to be earning that much 12 years later, and basically Claire's just a gobby mare.

And she didn't start at 16 - she was a club rep in her early 20's, so she's risen incredibly quickly.

As with a lot of high profile sales earners, the job most probably takes very little skill, just a lot of balls and a big mouth.

I used to work in UBS, but my work was honest hard graft IT. No question about the high earnings of others. Lucinda could be in the area of monitoring the bank's exposure and compliance issues, with possibly HR personality profiling to hopefully suss out the Nick Leesons of this world.

God knows how many thousands were earned by banking analysts implementing Basel 2 compliance. Did any of that prevent the Subprime debacle - the very thing Basel 2 was designed to alert? The expensive guard dog never barked.

Wealthy institutions tend to pay out of modern day superstituion -- pay twice as much for anybody from Price Waterhouse, three times as much for anybody from IBM, four times as much for anybody from McKinley -- and feel good about it. And before that it was five times as much for Arthur Andersen, until they were deserved wound up over Enron complicity.

Business analysts would justify their high pay if they were transferring knowledge and experience from one proven implementation to another. The client is buying safety and a copycat shortcut.

Lucinda is appealing and quick, but hard to see her building credibility shifting cheap Amstrad boxes to high street retailers.

We paid Logica £1500k a day on Y2K and they did absolutely cock all! And nothing happened

they were in for about a year

you do the maths

The cowboys around Y2K time were absolutely disgraceful. When the business client woke up afterwards to the fact that they were conned the cowboys had gone, and the business turned their fury on the low-paid honest longterm IT employees.

For years afterwards IT budgets were sat on until they squeaked -- understandable. In that instance it did not pay to be honest.

As an IT bod (permie) - I have to ask the question... what if we hadn't put in all that work? Do people really want to take that risk?

My point exactly (the parentheses); they should have been running on a fully-tested build which could have been reimaged off CD if anything went bang.

On the Office-apps-and-printing issue - most corporate users will be relying on us in tech support... even if they are a really hot lawyer, financial analyst etc etc. The last thing we need them doing is mucking around with drivers. If it fails - call the helpdesk - we'll remote in and dig around - see if we can resolve it.

I'd be crap at putting together a pension package, or an ISA or whatever; I keep them up and running.