> The irony is that the author is a netpen person, which is sort of infamously the least demanding specialty in offensive security. I think that's a fairly swe

> The irony is that the author is a netpen person, which is sort of infamously the least demanding specialty in offensive security. I think that's a fairly sweeping judgement to make, and not entirely accurate. I think it says more about your own experiences than those of network penetration testers. You could equally cast the aspersion that red teamers are little more than Microsoft Office power users and occasional part-time domain admins and fall just as far outside of the mark. The speciality is certainly demanding. The generalisation is not. The difference is that scan and scram artists and PCI scanners get lumped into the more general area associated with network penetration testing. When done properly, network penetration testing is inherently valuable, not just from a security perspective but from a network discovery and debugging perspective. I think your point on network testing (and indeed points 2 and 3), are shining examples of navel gazing within your own experience. Perhaps it's best not to belittle an entire subsection of the industry you spent so long in all at once, but to ask yourself why you believe this to be the case and wonder where you may have gone wrong in this assertion.