Update and Ramblings

 Well, a week ago it sounded like we were headed for WWIII, and now the news cycle has shifted and we're back to 'normal'.

Actually, it reminds me of when my Mom was dealing with cancer. How her health fluctuated up and down. 

Sometimes she was in the hospital, sometimes she was home and 'normal'... but despite the cyclical ups and downs the overall trend was down.

This time, we had a sitting President bomb the sovereign territory of another nation - without the usual 'treaties' and agreements that allowed us to take action in the other places we've bombed, without a declaration of war from Congress, without all the usual fakery. And the usual people point this out and complain, and the usual people shrug and move on, and it's hard to say that it actually matters.

Except it's an ocean tide sweeping away another swath of sand from the beach called 'rule of law'. Another hefty bit of erosion ruining it all.

*sigh*

And here I am, still looking for a damn job.

It's frustrating, of course. I am 100% sure that if I got hired as a SOC Analyst (what I'm currently applying for the most) that I could do the job, do it well, and the company that hires me would not regret it. I've been studying regularly, working towards the GCIH and doing rooms in TryHackMe, and I'm pretty confident I can do the job.

I am not, however, confident at all that whoever is hiring will ever look past my resume (with a dearth of actual InfoSec experience. Though, honestly... are ELK stack searches when troubleshooting an application in DevOps truly that much different from a SIEM search? Or building a dashboard in either? I think the basic skills are the same, and it's just a matter of using the right keywords and syntaxes and filtering tools... but whatever.)

It is very frustrating, and depressing, and I after so many applications with either the polite e-mail saying they're proceeding with other candidates or the usual black hole of nothing, I am wondering if I need to change up what I'm doing somehow.

I don't really want to change the type of job I'm applying for, even though I'm sure there are other jobs in IT I might have an easier time getting. Idk, I had put off seriously trying to do any sort of bug bounty hunting because at the end of the day I'm far more interested in tracking an incident through massive log searches (with maybe a bit of malware analysis and/or dfir) than I am with actually hacking into things, but at least if I did the bug bounty hunting I wouldn't have to deal with trying to convince hiring managers that I'm their best candidate.

Though maybe I should pull back and consider an even bigger change. Still, I think I'd face the same sort of problems no matter what I tried. 

I mean, blogging still sometimes comes to mind... I do like thinking and writing about things, and it'd be hella flattering if people were interested enough in hearing my takes to actually pay for it.

But it's not like I have a fanbase to build upon, and trying to build a following would probably mean trying to figure out what people want to hear (which would change things considerably) and would also probably take time to get sustainable (if it ever did).

So yeah, probably about as likely as my deciding to take a vow of poverty and join a convent or something.