I'm still often kinda stunned by the people in this market and this world who say they urgently want A) a cybersecurity job or B) to emigrate
And I directly offer to to help them by offering my calendar for the next month,
for free, no strings
And they're just like, nah, that time isn't convenient
If you can't meet one single, totally free 30 minute online meeting in either the early morning or late evening across a whole month, and you want to get into cybersecurity in 2026, or immigrate to another country
no, you don't
@hacks4pancakes What do you think is actually going on?
Confused? Anxious? Executive Dysfunction? Unrealistic? Bone idle?
(I'm NOT confusing ND with idleness in my internal ontology here, but I wonder if either might be contributing...)
@hacks4pancakes @DamonHD I forgot what the term is, but it's a normal psychological thing where not paying for it makes it feel like it's not valuable so they treat it (and you) as such. That intrinsic motivation isn't there without feeling like they are losing something.
Similar reason a bunch of us couldn't be bothered to get good grades I think.
If you want to do it from kindness, charge something if they miss a meeting maybe.
@hacks4pancakes I've met a lot of people who claim to be jealous of the travel I've done that could have done the same if they'd prioritised it like I did.
It's unfortunate that they waste your time while working through their feelings.
@cford @hacks4pancakes it's easy to see greener grass on the other side of the fence when you don't see the full picture.
Lots of travel is interesting. It also creates its own unique flavor of loneliness, even when you know people in all of those locations. It's destabilizing. It's exhausting in its own way.
In case it wasn't obvious, I'm speaking from personal experience.
@hacks4pancakes I am going to use this as a template, too, for how management acts when they say "We take #infosec and #privacy seriously", and then shunt proposed meetings wayyy into the hazy future. With their underlings, 2-3 levels down and no mandates.
(One weird difference though: they still *pay* me. Go figure.)
To play devil's advocate: a few times, I've broken off negotiations with potential employers (even ones in whose operations I was very interested) because they insisted on migrating the discussion from an asynchronous format (e-mail) to a synchronous format (voice call), and I was concerned that meant either they wanted to bounce me into agreeing in the heat of the moment to something disagreeable, or they wanted deniability for things they might promise.
Lesley Carhart 
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