Career

So this is kind of a tech related question, but also a bit off topic. I'm about to graduate from school. I'm mostly interested in IT. So basically programming or cybersecurity. A bit about myself: - I have experience with Python, C/C++ (just random projects, from simple Python stuff to a bit more complicated backdoors, rootkits and similar things in C/C++) - Little experience in cybersec (offensive security and some basics about cybersec in general) - Experience with Linux and Linux servers itself So I probably see myself working somewhere in the IT industry. However, it might be difficult due to no college degree, as well as no uni degree. I doubt that I'll be able to even get into an IT college or any IT uni. My grades are not the best. Besides IT, I'm also interested in business, finances and marketing. So I thought I have a few options here. 1) Attempt to get into an IT uni or IT college (the odds of that are low) 2) Get more educated on IT myself and then try looking for a job where they don't care about your degree 3) Use the college money on a business startup (and ofc get more educated towards business and marketing first) I feel like I want to go with option 3, but it's also pretty risky. What are your thoughts on this? (Sorry for the thread being that long lol)

>>60915 Do you want to work as a programmer or not? If you are interested in cybersecurity, you might be interested in a sysadmin program, too. Some cybersecurity companies hire people with sysadmin backgrounds (it's definitely easier to get into cybersecurity as a sysadmin than as a programmer). Regardless, if you want to get into cybersecurity or become a sysadmin, you should study networking, OSI model and TCP/IP protocols (read Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach or Computer Networks by Tanenbaum). Also, try to get internship in some company (even if you don't get any money out of it). >1) Attempt to get into an IT uni or IT college (the odds of that are low) This is the easiest route (as long as you have the money). Even if you can't get into the best school. And I think it's easier to get an internship if you are studying in some school. >2) Get more educated on IT myself and then try looking for a job where they don't care about your degree If you decide to go this route, then you must make some kind of portfolio on Github (or similar) and (preferably) get some kind of cert (like LPIC-1 if you want to get into cybersec or become a sysadmin). >3) Use the college money on a business startup (and ofc get more educated towards business and marketing first) I think it's way too risky (as you said). Also check out Programming Employment thread >>>/λ/30745

don't be so negative about starting your own company. its certainly not without some risk, but going to uni has some risks too. Might waste four years of your life and learn what you could learn in two months, if you don't know it already, for one. If you're compotent and good at dealing with people a degree is not terribly neccisary. It might help if you get a few gigs doing random contract stuff or a 'day job' that provides dependable income to start out, but after you've got a little experience (and assuming you actually can do your work), you'll probably be ahead of 85% of college graduates in employability many places.

Hi OP, I just kind of casually and sporadically lurk this particular world wide web v2.0 collaborative image sharing bulletin board system -- honestly still haven't even seen the show, but I'm getting to it and I'm down with the whole, uh, je ne sais gestalt or whatever. In 1998 I was too busy being a fuarrrking baller, or should I say blader (n-no, not bey-- the oth-- th-- roller-- fu-- god damn fruit bootin', dig) and a few years later, they put Rurouni Kenshin instead of Lain on the Toonami line-up so, like, well, y'know? Anyway you seem to have some trouble seeing what's in front of you in this situation, so for a few days I've been meaning to come back to this thread to inform you of exactly how fuarrrking made you have it. You have it not only made, but custom-made, bespoke, my dude. Bear with me, I'm trying not to sound like I'm on coke and trying to sell you something, but you really don't appreciate what you have to offer. >it might be difficult due to no college degree Haha, good one. Moving on, >basically programming or cybersecurity I mean, kinda, not really? I don't know how "basically" you meant that, but that is a pretty quick version of a summary. There is, naturally, a veritable labyrinth of different soykaf you can do and it can be a project spanning weeks or more just to explore the various sub-disciplines and training/career paths that there are. In a sense, you can reduce many tech sub-specialties to "programming" just as you can reduce most skilled labor to "reshaping and rearranging objects", but reduction does get unproductive at best after some point. >cybersecurity Is this pretty much the level of detail you're looking at or is it just a high-level overview for the post? Ideally you're aware of various roles under this umbrella, what their driving/overarching purposes/missions are, what the day-to-day looks like, what skills are sought and which ones are used, how to get there and where it leads, all that kind of career path soykaf. So are you thinking something like working in a SOC, getting trouble tickets of potential breaches/vulnerabilities from log consolidation and monitoring software, triaging and passing it up to more senior analysts for follow-up, becoming one in a few years and responding more thoroughly to issues that are happening right now? Incident response team -- it's been compared to firefighters -- swarming in to mitigate an active attack and preserving the relevant ephemeral data in real time using a well-honed playbook of SOPs? Digital forensics, maybe you're more into being the detective-after-the-fact, some soykaf went down a while ago and you're the expert not only in being able to tell what happened and who did it based on some obscure tangentially related log or cache somewhere, but also in being able to prove it in court? (For reference, many DF experts work in this area, but it is not at all necessary for a digital forensics career to involve any illegal or obscene material, should you wish to avoid it) Or you can be someone who actively looks for vulnerabilities in your own systems, or someone who infiltrates obscure communities -- ones where information about future attacks or unpatched vulns might be found -- and gathers intel like some kind of internet field operative, or, soykaf, man, you can make a whole career, a whole-ass six-digits-per-year cushy-ass career doing literally nothing except being an expert at one specific brand of firewall and how to make it do what people want it to do. This can be broad or narrow, you can dig a comfy little niche or go for the super sampler buffet, whatever. Or there's malware analysis; to me this one feels like staying inside on a rainy day and curling up with a nice low-effort game of mahjong solitaire or something like that. The low-effort part is not so accurate, to be sure, but the point is I get a certain comfortable feeling like that when I dip my toes into the idea of meticulously unraveling and tracing and piecing back together how some malware is doing its thing. Maybe one of these is something like that for you, or something not listed, who knows. So, like, if you haven't thought about any of that soykaf then you might want to get more specific. But anyway,

>>61346 >programming Yes, this is the first part, this is Part I of why you are, as they say for some reason, in like Flynn, whoever the fuarrrk that even is. Being able to code by itself makes you some orders of magnitude more immediately useful, and with greater potential, and more highly sought-after in pretty much any IT field -- not least cybersecurity, naturally, but really any discipline in which you benefit from being able to code your own tools, automate tasks where patterns can be identified, and understand what's happening in someone else's... tool, script, trojan, rootkit, game, what have you. So the fact that you have experience in this is great, Python is a very fortunate and flexible choice that would help a lot in infosec, networking -- well, pretty much, like, all of them? The C/++ takes you to the next level, like, boop, next order of magnitude, next standard deviation of "hire this right now", whatever you wanna do. I'm not sure how deep you've gone with the rats/rootkits/whatever but it is probably needless to say that this path of study sets you up nicely for that malware analysis role, or various types of senior security analyst, incident handler, investigator, un-fuarrrker, anti-fuarrrker, test-fuarrrker, the usual. I mean, look, I could go into detail about each point you've brought up but I've gone into probably more than enough as it is -- the problem is that you just kind of rattle this soykaf off all casual like you're not describing a fuarrrking golden unicorn of IT, like, do you hear yourself? Allow me to condense it: ``` - I can write Python and C and C++ - I have experience using them to automate tasks, test/implement exploits, find vulnerabilities, analyze malware, etc. - I'm familiar with information security fundamentals - It's a Unix system, I know this - I have stood up some kind of server before and I'm probably competent in the command line - I'm not only graduating from high school (?) with a god damn IT resume ready to go, but also: - Probably not a sperg, can talk to / give a soykaf about people and can probably avoid giving overly snappy answers to stupid questions, read between lines, figure out what people really want/need, etc. - Interested in the business needs (BIG IF TRUE) - Interested in the cash flow (see above, also indicative of a broader interest in systems -- tech, tax, law, finance, obscure regulatory soykaf, insurance, and cetera) - Probably big-picture enough to appreciate the inter-relations / dependencies of areas like tech, business ops, accounts/finance, marketing/sales/PR, and so on, while also having proven ability to drill down and deal with the hard (as in science not as in difficulty) technical details ``` Do you see? If you don't understand why this is a big deal, it's because you assume everyone else at IT entry level is coming in with a comparable amount of experience and skill, and you haven't the slightest idea just how precious little most people have to put on their resumes when they're starting out in the field. I didn't have anything nearly this good to put on my resume for at least a few years, optimistically. When I got my first job in support about 15 years ago, my resume was basically just "I know computers and I like to help people on the internet and/or my grandparents with computer soykaf, hire me so I can take this propeller hat off plz". You are, evidently, going to need to remain aware of imposter syndrome and try not to fall too deep into it. Just a few more quick notes to wrap up: >no college degree nobody cares, it helps later maybe kind of but this is a meritocracy, also probably don't do a "cybersecurity" degree, computer science will be more valuable/useful and valued/respected >doubt that I'll be able to even get into an IT college Haha that's another good one, you can probably get into WGU right now but probably don't bother just yet >My grades are not the best nobody cares, also don't tell them that >try looking for a job where they don't care about your degree That's all of them bro, you see how almost all of the jobs that want a bachelor's degree tend to say some soykaf like "...or commensurate/equivalent/relevant experience"? That's the part where instead of having a B.S. in RJ-45 Crimping Science, you say "Hi, I have crimped 9,001 motherfucking patch cables and I bestow upon myself an honorary degree of bachelor of science in RJ-45 crimping" and they say "ok cool please don't hurt me, sign here". That is to say: nobody cares >Use the college money on a business startup This is, prima facie, a completely terrible idea, as I'm sure you know. But it does bear asking, what is "the college money", like where does it come from and do you have to pay it back? But yes, as you know, this is very likely to fail with no returns, please don't use things like this for business ventures, if you have a good idea someone will fund/invest/vc, don't go out of pocket as the first option. Why do you want to go with option 3? Is it just because it's the least unknown of all the options? Or the least vague/indeterminate? Like, get more educated on IT? What does that mean and when does it end and how do I know when to stop doing that and start getting a job, and so on? Might as well just start a business, at least then I know what I'm doing and where I'm going and whose fault it is if it doesn't work out. Maybe it's because you see the potential for indefinitely procrastinating on the "looking for a job" stage by saying you just need a bit more education to be competent and hireable and whatnot. Well, again, to be clear, you sound extremely hireable right now. If you're interested in marketing then go learn how to sell yourself without uttering any falsehoods or misrepresenting any facts. You have a promising skill set to start out with, but the most prized and desired skills are always the skills of: - being teachable / coachable / willing to learn / aware of known unknowns and unknown unknowns - being able to accept feedback/criticism graciously -- better yet, desiring criticism and feedback because they help you learn and grow - (as applicable) being cognizant of the fact that you work in a team and attempting to function as a member of one and not just as someone who happens to be around - not being a douche or otherwise a pain in the ass to talk to and work with every day - being able to try to find answers to questions by yourself - being able to not ask the same question more than twice Oh yeah I forgot, also don't forget about just plain networking, like, just routing protocols and network architecture and packet flow and TCP/IP anatomy and telephony session handling and and and... all goes deep enough to keep you busy for several lifetimes, and the programming helps greatly there as well. If this interests you then start with the CCNA R&S glhf