This. So much this. Unless you’re going the vulnerability/malware research, reverse engineering, or something equally specialized don’t paint yourself into a c

This. So much this. Unless you’re going the vulnerability/malware research, reverse engineering, or something equally specialized don’t paint yourself into a corner and limit your options with over specific signaling. And realize that the above are tough roles to get paid for. There aren’t many of them, you have to have intense technical skills across many domains to be effective. All things considered you are unlikely to be able to make as much money as a developer (with just a little business savvy) putting in the same amount of effort. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still an old hacker at heart and infosec has a lot of amazing aspects of it. It is one of the last holdouts of the old community-driven cultures around computing, but know what you’re getting into with open eyes. Recruiters and businesses have been working hard to commoditize it for years, and will continue to. In addition it’s been a “hot” job track for a while now, similar to “devops” a few years ago, so you’ll find a lot of folks in it without a particular interest or understanding beyond the surface level resume fodder.