SwiftOnSecurity
IT career advice:
The tools you already have do a LOT more than your company uses them for. Often products are purchased to do ONE thing. Tools need both a motivated admin + one with time.
Learn what you already own and master it. I see this CONSTANTLY. Volunteer responsibility.
Aug 25, 2023 at 9:47pmWeb
Show threadSwiftOnSecurityAug 25, 2023
I have finally been on the other end of this. I am the "Product Owner" of a bunch of tools at work. I'm spread thin on some things.
TODAY someone pointed out to me an incredible feature a tool has, that we were pushing another team to buy a whole other $90k solution for!
Show threadMoritz DietzAug 26, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity Great thread. Not sure if you've encountered this: The tricky part is to have management of the buying team to actually listen to this advice. We've been in situations where we have told other teams "No. This product you want it absolute trash, too expensive and we already have a solution in-house, which does what you need but is run by another team in our org". For some reason they like "owning" a new platform (which comes with all the bureaucracy of owning software.
Show threadMoritz DietzAug 26, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity To me, your posts usually result in something clicking which I have thought about every once in a while. It's like a good conversation you have which enables you to fill in the gaps that you tried to fill in. With that said, I think that, at least to me, the evangelism part of being a PO to other teams and their management inside an organization is key to so many things. By avoiding shadow IT you gain so much – reducing costs and saving time specifically.
Show threadSwiftOnSecurityAug 25, 2023
I even STARTED my career being skeptical of the governance of an antivirus solution. And it was far worse than I thought when I got access. Nobody was administering it because nobody was interested.
I've jumped upwards in experience, by gaining responsibility nobody else wanted.
Show threadIPmongerAug 25, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity This is an extremely effective “shortcut” to career progression. Intentionally choosing this can be powerful, but you need to remain intentional in your decisions to *not* volunteer as well to maintain a course you have chosen for your growth.
Show threadTobyAug 26, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity Just being the one person willing to read the error message goes a long way.
Show threadTupcakesAug 26, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity I did that with sharepoint 2010 back in the day. It definitely helped my career, but at what cost?
Show threadSkattrdAug 26, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity My entire 40-year career (now retired) as a Sysadmin and subsequently Infosec Engineer was a sequence of “Hey, this is interesting, it clearly should be done, doing so would solve other problems, and nobody’s doing it so let me get that figured out for you.” Near career end I started butting heads with management who barely appreciated all of the various things that I actually did (which people other than my management appreciated very much), but somehow wanted me to be more focused on what they thought I *should* be doing. Sort of a sit-down-and-shut-up situation.
Show thread"Nurture-boy" Ric FlairAug 25, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity
This is what I was ostensibly hired to do at my job. It's a little daunting to learn specialized software that does things I don't know anything about (accounting, project management, etc). Once I start grokking it, then I shadow users to see how I can improve their workflow.
Show threadLunchbox700Aug 25, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity I find a lot that it’s important to learn how the tools interconnect. To many of my peers get tunnel vision on their product and try to invent something it can do when another interdependency already does that
Show threadAndrew JimenezAug 25, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity As a vendor with a product that has a LOT of options, I see this all the time. We started offering a meeting option for our customers to schedule a call with an engineer to ensure they are getting all the value out of the product. It is great to come out of a call with a customer who tells me they learned a lot after a call.
Show threadFlorianTischnerAug 25, 2023

@asjimene

@SwiftOnSecurity

How can I as a customer differentiate this kind of meeting from a "we're going to upsell so hard this meeting alone will get us bonuses"-salespitch disguised as a technical meeting?

Show threadJanne MorenAug 26, 2023

@FlorianTischner @asjimene @SwiftOnSecurity

In my experience, insist on the person being an engineer, not from sales. If the company tries to push a salesperson on you, cancel the meeting.

Show threadAndrew JimenezAug 26, 2023
@jannem @FlorianTischner @SwiftOnSecurity great point. We're very transparent and specifically state that your call will be with an Engineer. I can imagine this will vary wildly between different vendors.
Show thread🐙ptoothfish🐙Aug 25, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity that’s crazy talk, if we are stopping and building out capabilities on the 3 overlapping-functionality platforms we already have, then we aren’t delivering change in the form of piloting the entry-level features of a new platform to redo some of our work
Show threadRichard HectorAug 26, 2023
@SwiftOnSecurity
With care, perhaps. "Excel can be used as a database" is not necessarily a good answer ...