Conversation

Notices

1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 10:34:42 EDT Gurjeet ✅

   Had a moment today. I started out in IT as wanting to be a SysAdmin; that was good for a fair while and I was quite good at it. In the backend of it all, was the driving force of wanting to be good enough to be labelled a "hacker" of the old school variety. Eventually being a sysadmin started to be more about administrative tasks like projection costs and spending more time in Excel, Word, PowerPoint, wiki/confluence, managing a team, than fun stuff like coding & designing infrastructures.

   1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 10:39:15 EDT Gurjeet ✅

      in reply to

      2/x? Throughout it all I kept an eye on all things security and hacker-y related, but it was at the periphery of things I was doing. I was never gonna be as good as the people who published stuff in phrack, 2600, dr. dobbs, etc because I just read about it, never doing anything (who wants to sit in front of a computer after working in front of one all day??). I saw that being a SysAdmin as a label was becoming more of a dead end, and I needed to move up and on. By then I was behind the curve ..

      1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 10:43:24 EDT Gurjeet ✅

         in reply to

         3/x .. of things technical. The "Cloud" was up and running for a while, people were already deep into using things like Ansible/Chef/Kubernetes and I didn't have access to that kind of a platform to learn that tools and none of the local companies were interested in that to train people in all things DevOps. An opportunity came up that allowed me to work from home on Nessus plugins as a QA person. I figured learn from the bottom and work my way up. Well I learned lots, had a new appreciation ...

         1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 10:47:08 EDT Gurjeet ✅

            in reply to

            4/x of all things QA. Its an interesting track to get on if you've never done it before and doing it well Is not as easy as running pass/fail tests! Eventually I got laid off and man was I depressed! I started comparing myself to the people who didn't and was also pissed. I had to find a job fast. While looking in the #InfoSec field and still feeling majorly bummed about how I wasn't good enough to be in #infosec , Birdsite connections were massively supportive and helpful. Took a while to ...

            1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 10:52:19 EDT Gurjeet ✅

               in reply to

               5/x get to my point (this is my way if you know me..:) ) but the question that was asked frequently and that stumped me hard was, "Well what are you looking for? What field in #infosec are you looking to be in? What do you want to do?" .. Stopped me cold everytime. I was still reeling from being let go from a great company with really great friends and needed a job fast that was comparable to support my family. Brain was white noise for everything except "Get job, pay bills". Eventually, I got..

               1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 10:57:00 EDT Gurjeet ✅

                  in reply to

                  6/x .. a spot with a good local company, with old University peers whom I hadn't seen in like nearly 20 some years. Old friends, good pay, QA working on a new GSMA ratified protocol. Cool shit, that can lead to some great learning opportunities if I can exact the willpower to forge forward eschewing some of my usual social ways:) Been at this job for about a year now, and watching friends getting excited to be at #HackerSummerCamp and I've got heavy FOMO on the go. "The Question" once again ...

                  1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 11:04:56 EDT Gurjeet ✅

                     in reply to

                     7/x .. bubbles to the top of my brain as I think to being in an #InfoSec related job... And just like that, a year later.. I think I might finally have an answer. 42 years old and I may have finally figured out "What do you wanna do for your 2nd career track (with your life)" .. "I wanna rock" while a great answer (watch the Twisted Fucking Sister documentary on Netflix, its awesome) wasn't it. I finally have a goal and can see a path to it.. now its a question of willpower. Will see how it goes

                     1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 11:06:49 EDT Gurjeet ✅

                        in reply to

                        8/8 FIN! Maybe i'll start documenting things as encouragement..*shrug* just happy I'm able to answer "The Question" and had to share. Sorry for the verbosity Masto-fiends .. :)

                        1. thurloat 📌 (thurloat@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 12:13:56 EDT thurloat 📌

                           in reply to

                           @Toxic_Flange mastodon is pro verbosity! great to hear you're feeling on track Gurjeet :) Happy to have an update, I'm pretty much 0% birdsite at this point so I miss out on a lot of local folks.

                           1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 12:49:13 EDT Gurjeet ✅

                              in reply to

                              @thurloat meh.. local folks aint all that :) most local tech people are in slack though.

                              1. thurloat 📌 (thurloat@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 13:39:14 EDT thurloat 📌

                                 in reply to

                                 @Toxic_Flange RIP IRC

                                 1. Gurjeet ✅ (toxicflange@mastodon.club)'s status on Tuesday, 07-Aug-2018 14:05:17 EDT Gurjeet ✅

                                    in reply to

                                    @thurloat Its got consistency! Slack I mean.. you can scroll back on your device or desktop client.. its not all bad :)