Raw LLM Responses

Cybersecurity can be different. I was a front end dev, then a release engineer (out of necessity, I needed a job and I lived in a tiny tech sector), and then finally pursued pentesting in a new city. I work for a firm that values their team members and their happiness, career progression, and technical progression highly. It’s not strictly a cybersecurity firm, so they have experience treating employees like human beings regardless of industry. There’s no agile process BS (even though I do miss a little bit of the structure there). No sprints, no toxic retros, no technical backlog. The job itself is fun (pretending to break the law full time is interesting), the people are knowledgeable, and I’m well compensated. I miss coding full time at times, but whenever I get the itch, I work on a side project or I dream up some new hacking tool and build it. The path to getting hired is clear, no bs leetcode or algorithmic questions, just culture fit and experience. If you don’t have experience, I can tell you exactly how to get some/what to do to get noticed. Pentesting isn’t without its downsides. Reporting is boring, and when you’re hired by an org’s audit department to hack their network sometimes IT isn’t willing to play ball. Overall though, I really enjoy it. I do think a lot of this is attributable to working for a company that I love. I don’t have experience working for other pentesting teams, so maybe it can suck just like OP said. But I’d encourage you to look around. My wife is an RN, so I know all the CYA, toxic BS you’re dealing with. Don’t be discouraged about a switch.