A couple of posts ago I referred to the book Hope for the Flowers, and mentioned that instinctive sense that this is something that will help me become who I want to be.
It got me thinking about where I am now, and why my current position doesn't fit that description.
The journey of self discovery is never ending, and I've learned a few things about myself since I changed careers (again) and got a Master's in Computer Science.
1) I like solving puzzles. This is good and bad, in that I've been able to really dig into the weeds on parts of our application and now know those parts better than team members who have been there a lot longer. It's part of why they like me so much. But it's bad... because for the most part the offshore team has the manpower and resources to do intensive work on things (like writing scripts to automate some of our tasks, or building dashboards to capture key information, or figuring out how and why the app works the way it does and trying to illustrate it with a diagram) whereas our onshore team - my team - is small and all too often dealing with whatever the issue of the day is.
I have a list of self-identified projects I'd like to work on for things that would make our jobs easier, but all too often I am getting pulled into this meeting or that, or getting asked to put together the information needed for an ask on one of our tickets, or some other thing, and I rarely get uninterrupted time to focus on any of those things.
I think - I know I can handle other tasks. I've been in leadership positions before. I can do the endless meetings and powerpoint presentations and plan and manage people and discuss KPI's and whatever... but I think I actually like just quietly working on some puzzle or another.
As I learn more about infosec and cyber security, I realize that there are parts of it that aren't actually that appealing to me. I get the whole CIA concept, and the need to quantify business risks and make the business case for some course of action or mitigation, and although I'm confident I am capable of doing so, I don't think I actually want to deal with any of that.
Instead, I think I would really enjoy doing something like reverse engineering malware or something. Perhaps learning more about how to look through Splunk logs to identify malicious activity and track down the cause. Unfortunately, tbh I am mentally exhausted at the end of the work day and don't really have the energy to teach myself what I would need to know for yet another career change, and I think it's unlikely someone will hire me with the understanding that I would have to learn quite a lot about the field before I could be productive. (I think I would kick ass at it once I get past the learning period, but whatever.)
But puzzle solving in and of itself isn't enough. If that was all I needed, my current job would work well enough. This leads me to the next point:
2) I want to have a positive impact.
It's not that I'm not having a positive impact in my current position. I actually kind of like pointing something out or asking a question, and knowing that I have potentially saved hours of misguided efforts. Like 'hey, this source connector needs to have an IP and port address to work, and it goes through a jump server to get to it's destination. Have we submitted the request to set up that passage through the jump server? If so what's the port number we're using?'
(Note: I am trying not to go into too much technical detail, not just to save the sanity of non-techie people, but also because mentioning specific software can give away too much information to potential hackers.)
And that's all well and good, and rewarding, but ultimately the job itself is... okay I guess. It's mostly putting money in the corporate pockets, honestly. Our app does sometimes impact the end user (i.e. a normal person who is a customer of our client), and I do want to make sure they don't have any issues. Like a website taking too long to load, or having inaccurate information regarding their usage.
It just doesn't seem as important as pushing back the encroachment of hackers who potentially make using the internet so risky that nobody would trust it. Or identifying nation/state actors trying to do some shadowy activity. We seem to have a budding cyber war already occurring outside the awareness of the average person, and I want to have some say in how that goes.
Which is somewhat related to another point...
3) I appear to have a good amount of potential for a variety of different things.
That seems very vague and perhaps a bit self-congratulatory, so let me explain a bit more.
Throughout my life, the one adjective people regularly use to describe me is 'intelligent'.
This seems like rather boring and non-descriptive when I think about it. Like... okay, I guess I'm smart, but so what? I pick things up quickly, I learn fast, I can solve more complicated puzzles.
Great. Makes my life easier. It's part of why I do well in classroom environments, and generally make whoever hires me happy.
It's also a trait I never really chose. Like having brown hair or hazel eyes.
"You have brown hair."
"You are intelligent."
Why do people act like the second statement is so much better than the first?
Granted, intelligence is part of why I'm good at puzzle solving. But then why is puzzle solving any more valued or important than someone being good at drawing? Or good at handling emergencies in an ER?
If I were to get down to it, intelligence is more an indicator at how fast you can learn something, and how deep you can go when you master a field. And it can be applied to almost any field of interest, but you still have to put in the work to learn and master that field.
In other words - intelligence might make you reach a certain point of mastery in computer science faster than someone else, or do the same for civil engineering, or physics, or any number of fields... but you still have to put in the work, and you don't really have the time to master everything.
So it's more like it gives you more options, and you can perhaps go a bit further than others in whatever area you focus on. (It can also lead to jealousy and pushback. I know in my first platoon, as a young butterbar lieutenant, one of my NCO's said a fellow officer was less than supportive because he felt like I could 'just pick up a manual and memorize it'. Which seems a bit exaggerated from my perspective. I generally think holistically and have to figure out where to place that information in the greater whole before I can really remember it, and I'm terrible at remembering exact quotes and phrases. But sure. Close enough.)
But to get back to the main point - intelligence can help you succeed at almost anything.
Which is why even though I have been doing well at my current job, it feels like only a fraction of what I'm capable of. (There was a reason 'be all that you can be' appealed to me back in the day. I was sad to discover that that's a lot harder to achieve than it seems.)
Those instincts saying that this is something that will help? It's generally because there's a position that seems challenging.
The right type of challenging, too. Something right at the edge between 'not really challenging, and therefore won't help you grow' and 'so overwhelmingly challenging that it's too much, and you will fail.'
Something that pushes you past your comfort level, but isn't setting you up for failure by being impossible to achieve.
There might be more to it than this, but my dog is asking to go out and I don't have anything more to add for now.
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