This was fascinating! If I could do it all over again, I'd have gone into the US Foreign Service. Maybe not to places like North Korea (which we don't have a presence in anyways), but I'd have loved to travel the world. Maybe in the next life...
I told myself this about an important decision. I thought about it more and decided I didn't really believe in that (proof: what do you remember from your last life), so just did it in this one. No regrets!
On one of my flights out of... I forget if it was SJC or SFO - but it was one of them... I sat next to someone in uniform and we got to talking. He was a former dentist who joined the military and was studying in Monterey his fifth foreign language https://www.dliflc.edu
Yes. Or more general:
work hard to get something. Even if you will never reach it, you might still improve enough in general, to be ready to do and get something else instead.
Unless you have broken software and hardware since the 1990s or 1980s, and then gotten a degree in management or engineering, my path is hard to replicate.
But I certainly can offer some advice:
1. Be hardcore and really interested in security. Read everything. Deep diving into networks, software, vulnerability, risk management.
2. Get a CISSP certifiaction, then maybe an ISO 27001 cert and then also something juicy from SANS (I have none of these).
3. Get an AWS or a public cloud of your choice certification
Also
* Cia triad
* Mitre attack framework
* Cis controls
* Nist framework
* Ise 62443
* Zero trust framework from NIST
Get work experience, projects, situations, grow and evolve
They're disproportionately requirements for the worst, lowest-status jobs in cybersecurity, and many of the best known and "highest placed" practitioners in the industry (not just in vuln research and xdev but also in management) don't have one.
To be fair: this is, like, a 2010 acronym, and I'm dating myself just by using it; I just have a dry-eye thing going today that's making screen time annoying and didn't want to type the words out. :)
No, we haven't. We disagree about something, but there was never a premise that we would agree. It's fine for us to disagree! We're two different data points, nothing more or less. An "impasse" implies there was a further destination for us to reach, if only we found common ground. Not so!
I think we sometimes look past how valuable it is to just have two clearly stated, conflicting views on an issue, without a day long effort to unify or persuade them.
