Hey all,
Firstly, not sure if this is the best place to ask this question, but here it goes anyways.
I’ve been a Systems Engineer for about 6 years now, and it’s fairly enjoyable. I get to program, play with hardware from time to time, but something is missing.
In my free time, I like to spin up projects on my home lab, write and host new open source projects, maintain a fairly complex network, etc.
A couple years ago, our company got hacked, and honestly, the aftermath was some of the most fun I’ve ever had at a job. I got to discover new tools to help my team (like Ansible to help us perform bulk actions across our tester fleet), I got to come up with clever ways to upgrade our fleet of machines to meet the new IT regulations and deploy them at scale once we got the green light to return to the labs and I got to think of new security strategies to help better protect us (my small team within the larger company) going forward.
After the dust settled, it was back to basically only programming, but I do miss when I was able to use my infra/ security/ networking knowledge for that short time.
If I were to change from Sys Engi to something else, what should I be looking for?
It sounds like you might want to pursue Security versus Systems, if you’re looking for that thrill of the hunt. If you do your job right, it gets boring though.