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Please imagine life outside the cybersecurity pipeline. I beg of you. Living is its own job experience. You can't follow my path, but I did Helpdesk for 10 years. I thought it was a shame. And now I'm proud of it and advertise. I didn't have the perspective to know what it gave me. You don't either.

You understand why I do this? Why I just talk about this all the time. I had nobody. Literally nobody I had ever seen. It was just insults about helpdesk being stupid. Took to heart. For a decade. And it utterly destroyed me and my dreams. Don't be this. Don't be someone who doesn't get it.

I fucking engineered. I fucking delivered. I was not my job title but that's all I allowed myself to be. I was little and small and discardable. In confluence of fate I suddenly was elevated. And I saw. All the lies I lived. Which I punished myself with. Don't do this. Please. Don't be who I was.

A theme, that life will give some signal to move on. But life will only give you the comfort of your stratum. You will probably feel acceptable, at a certain point. And you're just gonna do it for years. Like I did. Tragedy compelled me to examine my life. Still took me years. I hope that's not you.

I got a message from someone today working in Helpdesk, wanting to move into Security, thanking me for publicly talking about how important my Helpdesk experience was in my career. You may not get it, but they do. And that's why.

I got their permission to share their message to me. We need to tell people where we came from. The people they see as leaders or at least high-profile. We can't leave this to people selling 90-day Discord bootcamps. Because that's maybe all they're getting.

Sometimes I will get a chat from our utterly elite, extremely resourced Incident Response team. And they'll just ask me for a vibe check on something they observed or were worried about. I help guide them using my wealth of normal daily operational and Windows internals knowledge. That's my value.

help desk background works until the person that hired you is in the rear view and the folks who you work for now want to know why you don't have a degree and all the other magic paper the 20+ years of experience are not magic paper