Well, currently I’m open to anything, but I go back to school in the fall and should get workstudy so was thinking of checking the IT Helpdesk first at the school, but think I have enough personal experience that I could in theory do something like Junior Sysadmin or Junior Pentester. The main issue is that I live in a dead end state right now, and any job would have to be remote for the most part, which most companies won’t do. Another problem is that I don’t exactly have a great reputation because of assholes that I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with since I was a teenager. There is also the dumb case of my record with an online article that basically defames me and doxxes me. Also, a lot of misinfo. That article shows up when you google my name and also the stupid case, so idiots in HR get weird about it which ruined several job opportunities, and also I was harassed for months online which cost me my last job along with that dumb article… So think I’m going to just look for something outside the tech industry because so far the way I’ve been treated has been foul.
I’m sorry to hear that. It’s a shame to experience this kind of judgement in tech because many engineers I’ve met are some of the most open-minded people you’ll meet. Yet, there still remains the corporate structures that exploit us all. I’ve always been proud of my organization for not judging people based on paper qualifications. If not for that, I wouldn’t have my current job because I just don’t qualify for it.
I was curious because I wondered if you were more IT, security oriented, software development etc. I managed to get into a very weird tech job because I got recruited even though most of my background is more like test engineering. But, someone with an eye for such things felt I had a lot of potential. What’s your interest in penetration testing? Have you had an interest in offensive work?
I wanted to do red teaming when I was 18/19, but it is so niche that I don’t think I can get my foot in the door. I’m a hardware nerd and the past several months I have also started looking at overlooked protocols. I do plan on getting into more embedded and designing my own boards. Thing is, hardware is very overlooked which I feel like nobody is taking it serious enough. I still have an interest in the tech industry, but kind of just letting life do its thing and wherever I end up, I end up there.
If you would like to get a foot in the door, let me know and we can see if it makes sense. I might be able to help you get an interview. It’s kind of late for our internships this summer, but we do have openings periodically, and I think you’d benefit from our engineering-focused interviews. Do you like reverse engineering hardware? Rather, the opposite of design. Discovery.
You mean taking hardware apart or reverse engineering the software/firmware? Been planning on getting into reverse engineering firmware, but I take hardware apart a lot to figure out how they work because most of the time I can build something better and cheaper.
Both. As I’m sure you know, firmware and hardware are intimately related. We tend to do more software, but it depends on the project. I work for a small company, so we have to make do—I don’t think we have any purely software or hardware people. Understanding is the first step to exploitation.
Yeah. Life keeps getting in the way, but I’ve been having plans to at least start emulating firmware with QEMU and poke around a bunch of publicly available firmware. The biggest problem I do see with the learning curve is the machine language, but I don’t see it being too much of trouble once I grasp the basics enough to get a better idea what is going on. Finally got around to getting qemu up and running, so will try to get started with firmware once I get other more important things taken care of first.
Well, currently I’m open to anything, but I go back to school in the fall and should get workstudy so was thinking of checking the IT Helpdesk first at the school, but think I have enough personal experience that I could in theory do something like Junior Sysadmin or Junior Pentester. The main issue is that I live in a dead end state right now, and any job would have to be remote for the most part, which most companies won’t do. Another problem is that I don’t exactly have a great reputation because of assholes that I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with since I was a teenager. There is also the dumb case of my record with an online article that basically defames me and doxxes me. Also, a lot of misinfo. That article shows up when you google my name and also the stupid case, so idiots in HR get weird about it which ruined several job opportunities, and also I was harassed for months online which cost me my last job along with that dumb article… So think I’m going to just look for something outside the tech industry because so far the way I’ve been treated has been foul.
I’m sorry to hear that. It’s a shame to experience this kind of judgement in tech because many engineers I’ve met are some of the most open-minded people you’ll meet. Yet, there still remains the corporate structures that exploit us all. I’ve always been proud of my organization for not judging people based on paper qualifications. If not for that, I wouldn’t have my current job because I just don’t qualify for it.
I was curious because I wondered if you were more IT, security oriented, software development etc. I managed to get into a very weird tech job because I got recruited even though most of my background is more like test engineering. But, someone with an eye for such things felt I had a lot of potential. What’s your interest in penetration testing? Have you had an interest in offensive work?
I wanted to do red teaming when I was 18/19, but it is so niche that I don’t think I can get my foot in the door. I’m a hardware nerd and the past several months I have also started looking at overlooked protocols. I do plan on getting into more embedded and designing my own boards. Thing is, hardware is very overlooked which I feel like nobody is taking it serious enough. I still have an interest in the tech industry, but kind of just letting life do its thing and wherever I end up, I end up there.
If you would like to get a foot in the door, let me know and we can see if it makes sense. I might be able to help you get an interview. It’s kind of late for our internships this summer, but we do have openings periodically, and I think you’d benefit from our engineering-focused interviews. Do you like reverse engineering hardware? Rather, the opposite of design. Discovery.
You mean taking hardware apart or reverse engineering the software/firmware? Been planning on getting into reverse engineering firmware, but I take hardware apart a lot to figure out how they work because most of the time I can build something better and cheaper.
Both. As I’m sure you know, firmware and hardware are intimately related. We tend to do more software, but it depends on the project. I work for a small company, so we have to make do—I don’t think we have any purely software or hardware people. Understanding is the first step to exploitation.
Yeah. Life keeps getting in the way, but I’ve been having plans to at least start emulating firmware with QEMU and poke around a bunch of publicly available firmware. The biggest problem I do see with the learning curve is the machine language, but I don’t see it being too much of trouble once I grasp the basics enough to get a better idea what is going on. Finally got around to getting qemu up and running, so will try to get started with firmware once I get other more important things taken care of first.
I’m a QEMU developer also. Let me know if you have any questions!