OP, don't know you but big fan of your posts,especially the ChaCha20 writeup. What this article talks about somewhat translates to the larger infosec community

OP, don't know you but big fan of your posts,especially the ChaCha20 writeup. What this article talks about somewhat translates to the larger infosec community. A lot of the presumptions I had about working in infosec were false: - You need to be good at and understand software exploitation well - You need to be a good programmer - You need to know how to code (I do fwiw) - Your soft-skills should be great (not more than any regular office job) - You should know offensive techniques well, including breaking crypto - You need to go to cons and do heavy infosec social networking - You need to be good at math - You need to master every single IT discipline - How can you work in infosec if you never hacked a gibson? (joke) And many more. I can tell you,these types of elitist gate-keeping is why infosec always complains about a "skills shortage". I am nowhere near exhausting my mental/skill capacity with my day to day work and I do fairly well. I meet people all the time who never coded before and never heard of an elliptic curve that do well and impress me in very technical infosec disciplines. My suggestion to anyone considering infosec is, if you have strong interest in the subject and you enjoy the very technical aspects of it (even if you don't understand some things well), I say go for it regardless of what you lack so long as you don't lack motivation and free time to pursue your studies. There are plenty of jobs that need people with passion in infosec and you need to be an elite hacker as much as a sports team needs every player to be an egotistical superstar.