Royce Williams
(There's a reason why my LinkedIn says "security architect, tempered by ISP fires"!)
Taggart 
@tychotithonus I absolutely do not know how I'd do my defense job effectively without the years spent as a Linux sysadmin.
Ryan Castellucci (they/them) 
@tychotithonus Yuuup. I was a sysadmin at an ISP when I was a teenager. When I was doing CTFs seriously, like half my team were sysadmins.
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) 
Jason Parker (he/they)@tychotithonus I feel so seen. (except it's software developer)
This is my current job search.
Jason Parker (he/they) (@north@ꩰ.com)
I'll soon be able to call myself a #cybersecurity professional. I just received word that this company, to whom I've sent 6-8 vulnerabilities, will be sending me an offer for a mid-level position some time next week. I'll no longer be doing software development (primarily -- there will still be a little bit), after 20 years.
Anthony Hove 🐬It's always the experience 😜
For I am CJ 
I LOL'd... but my 2nd thought was also "this would be even funnier if it weren't true" 🙂
MrMozz@tychotithonus this is the very thing that kept me from being hired for any tech job after I graduated with an IT degree. At first I was outraged and bitter but having now worked in an IT career for several years I completely understand.
It's still a problem for new folks though. I wish there were more opportunities for on the job training for IT people. I'd love to see something more like an electrician apprenticeship program for sysadmins where they can start out training under an experienced greybeard and graduate to a Journeyman Admin.
Because you also wouldn't send out someone who had just studied electricity in school out to work on a power line; it would be a disaster.
@MrMozz Totally! Mentor/apprentice arrangements are much less common than they used to be - I think a little could go a long way there.
@MrMozz Also notice that the first person is also in the Olympics. :D
@tychotithonus yeah I guess I was looking at it as more of a before/after meme or a school vs field experience meme but fair point. I think I was making up some context of my own.
I also dont mean to say that theres anything wrong with college or trade school for IT education. I learned a ton in school and I was really fortunate that I got to go.
I guess what I'm really trying to say is that the difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory and that "the industry ™" could be more willing to take chances on mentoring people who are just getting into IT.
Viss@tychotithonus nailed it
"Offensive" Security Engineer 
@tychotithonus ah yes the two genders
hko 😷🪁@tychotithonus linking in a thread with fan art: https://mastodon.social/@violetblue/112897334749328375
masukomi@tychotithonus I feel like i don't know what to take away from this meme image.
like, yeah the cyber security degree looks like the cool young kid using fancy tech, and the sysadmin is just old-school
but is the sysadmin doing better or is the young kid kicking his ass?
It feels like i'm supposed to come away thinking that XP is better than cool tools, but maybe the opposite is true and using better tools has helped the young person do a better job.
Feels like a modern rorshachach test.
dog and the plate@tychotithonus just realised that he too is using a lense since he is wearing eyeglasses.
Cybarbie@tychotithonus We (I) advocate intake as helpdesk without degree prerequisites and progressing staff with training, experience and education. Experienced helpdesk staff are often the most knowledgable in the org.
You happen to have been a sysadmin and no doubt gained valuable experience - probably not exclusive to being a sysadmin, but have you never met any wildly incompetent sysadmins? No? I guess we should all go home, the sysadmins have got it covered lol.
@nf3xn I mean, I don't disagree (and we regularly recruited into sysdmin from tech support at $ISP 💪❤️) -- but nor do I think the use of the meme implies as much disdain as that. As I replied to others in the thread ... both of them are in the Olympics. 🍻
@tychotithonus I wouldn't say there is a sysadmin who has taken their cybersecurity option and come back thinking 'I learned nothing'. Not having a degree should never exclude but let's not fool ourselves into thinking it is not doing it the hard way. It certainly is possible in fact many do not but how many would say that was by choice. Furthermore, we often find there are things people don't learn on the job. As in business, the old 'school of hard knocks' does not teach you ethics. /1
@tychotithonus Staff with better job security are less amenable to coercion. And to pick at the wound a bit more I once had the idiot HR director ask "why would make our staff more marketable" - well I believe we should make our staff the very best they can be, and then try to retain them because we are a good employer rather than lock them up. It was the usual your budget capex argument but the attitude, wtaf what a culture.
@nf3xn Totally agreed to both. Theory and practice as a regular exchange have huge advantages over either in isolation. And I've dealt with technical support managers whose unironic goal was to hire the untrainable as a test of whether they had "dumbed down" the support process sufficiently 😡
@tychotithonus And not to belabor the point either but it should be a choice. Tertiary education is not for everyone, some people are very knowledgeable, clever, competent, intelligent but are not academic and cannot do exams.
@nf3xn Indeed! (And no worries about belaboring anything -- we're basically Belaboring as a Service careerists. 😉)
Gilgwath@tychotithonus I see why it's funny. But also, the reality of my job disagrees strongly with this theory. If this was the norm, I wouldn't regularly write 50 or 100 page reports about the horrible security of my customers networks and web applications. Sometimes the same company comes back two years later and all they've done in the mean time is update their TLS cert. 🤪
@gilgwath Indeed. See the other replies for further nuance.