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Security auditor in 2009/2010. In that job I was traveling the countryside of Afghanistan and visited the major US Army bases to provide information security a

Security auditor in 2009/2010. In that job I was traveling the countryside of Afghanistan and visited the major US Army bases to provide information security assessments and write reports. I got to see some of the exotic landscape and talk to many different interesting people. I also got to go on flying adventures that aren't allowed by passenger carriers in the US. This was incredibly rewarding for the reasons not related to the technical qualities of the job. At the end of my tour I read the ISC2 course book for the CISSP and passed the test on the first attempt. So now I just tell people to read the book and take the test from a management perspective and people look at me like I am crazy, because the test is so hard. My most rewarding job for purely the software angle was being the A/B test engineer at Travelocity from 2010 to 2012. I learned to master walking the DOM. Some of our tests were extremely ambitious to the point of wildly defacing large areas of complex pages on the site. Your code had to be defect free and execute before the regular areas of the page displayed to the user. Some of our experiments comprised multiple various pages and required altering the browser history and moving people around the site in non-standard ways. I learned to master my JavaScript browser interaction skills doing this job. You could not wait for framework or library code like jQuery, because it loaded too slowly and would bias the experiment. You simply had to learn to do the job against the actual web technologies. You also had to learn to execute quickly, because there were always more experiments demanding attention than we could ever get to which means potential lost revenue. It was always challenging and always rewarding. This job is what elevated me to a senior developer.

jlelonm 9y ago
"So now I just tell people to read the book and take the test from a management perspective and people look at me like I am crazy, because the test is so hard." Can you elaborate more on that? I'm interested.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- austincheney 9y ago
  The CISSP exam is a bit easier now that there are only 8 domains of knowledge and those domains are a bit more focused. When I took the test there were 10 domains of knowledge tested. In short the CISSP is the most respected certification for information security management even though the ISC2 organization offers more advanced certifications above the CISSP. I believe the SANS certifications are more respected technician certifications now, but they cost something like $4000 and you have to travel to their location to certify (or so the rumors claim). The CISSP exam is vendor agnostic. You have to apply and be approved to take the exam and it costs just shy of $700. Even with that price tag it only has about a 60% pass rate. When I took the test back in 2010 it was 250 questions and you had up to 6 hours to take it. Many of the questions had more than one correct answer so you had to read it carefully to pick the most correct answer. Many of the people who failed it, those that I knew, failed it for tactical reasons. It is a senior management test so I always tell people to remember on each and every question managers document and then they delegate. They don't do the real work, so if you answer any question with putting fingers on a keyboard you are likely wrong. The test wore me out as I took 5.5 out of the 6 available hours. Some of the questions were rather long like a page out of a textbook.

jlelonm 9y ago

"So now I just tell people to read the book and take the test from a management perspective and people look at me like I am crazy, because the test is so hard." Can you elaborate more on that? I'm interested.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
austincheney 9y ago
The CISSP exam is a bit easier now that there are only 8 domains of knowledge and those domains are a bit more focused. When I took the test there were 10 domains of knowledge tested. In short the CISSP is the most respected certification for information security management even though the ISC2 organization offers more advanced certifications above the CISSP. I believe the SANS certifications are more respected technician certifications now, but they cost something like $4000 and you have to travel to their location to certify (or so the rumors claim). The CISSP exam is vendor agnostic. You have to apply and be approved to take the exam and it costs just shy of $700. Even with that price tag it only has about a 60% pass rate. When I took the test back in 2010 it was 250 questions and you had up to 6 hours to take it. Many of the questions had more than one correct answer so you had to read it carefully to pick the most correct answer. Many of the people who failed it, those that I knew, failed it for tactical reasons. It is a senior management test so I always tell people to remember on each and every question managers document and then they delegate. They don't do the real work, so if you answer any question with putting fingers on a keyboard you are likely wrong. The test wore me out as I took 5.5 out of the 6 available hours. Some of the questions were rather long like a page out of a textbook.