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Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I

Good for you. I am not in a field where being a "specialist" is being a generalist who sort of kind of gets to choose what he works on. Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems. That's at all taken into account the sheer amount of architectural guidance, performance and fault debugging I Have to do. Now I also have to learn Pulumi and CDK just to have any prayer of a job if I'm forced to go back to the USA to make $$. I'm glad that you're proud of learning new things. I doubt you were born when I first learned to solve a Rubik's cube. Hats off to you for working in Security. I've worked for a couple of security startups, and the cynical nature of the industry combined with the pure bitterness of the security-focused people on our teams makes me uncomfortable to just think about.

lrvick 4y ago
I still learn and use all of the above tools regularly too as good security requires a good infra-as-code story. We often open source security-first ansible and terraform infra patterns in our community, #!, which may be of interest to you. https://hashbang.sh https://hashbang.sh https://github.com/hashbang https://github.com/hashbang A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk. Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now. Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)
andsoitis 4y ago
> Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems Couldn't you ramp up in another area of tech? There are many software engineering paths and jobs that don't require expertise in the things you mention.

lrvick 4y ago

I still learn and use all of the above tools regularly too as good security requires a good infra-as-code story. We often open source security-first ansible and terraform infra patterns in our community, #!, which may be of interest to you. https://hashbang.sh https://hashbang.sh https://github.com/hashbang https://github.com/hashbang A lot of open source work there has gotten a lot of us jobs with major pay increases. I know I personally strongly favor sysadmins whose work I can see online. Less risk. Also yes, security is a very negative industry, but people tend not to listen to overly negative people so I try to bring realistic threat models and spend most of my time teaching now. Anyway. Best of luck and by all means reach out on sysadmin security any time :)

andsoitis 4y ago

> Just to be employable I have to have strong, deep expertise in Terraform, about 30 AWS services, Ansible, Kubernetes, ArgoCD, and at least 5 different CI/CD systems Couldn't you ramp up in another area of tech? There are many software engineering paths and jobs that don't require expertise in the things you mention.