> I cannot recommend enough making a switch like this. It isn't easy. In fact, it can be really difficult.
Over the years I've become a little cynical when I see people asking "should I become a developer?" Because, on one hand, you are right. It changed my life in a positive way. But I've also realized how many people think, essentially, that they take a two-week course and they get a six-figure job where they fuck around all day. Not so much!
Unfortunately there are many companies that allow people to "fuck around all day" and excuse it as "they're still learning". I'm pretty good at being able to spot people who are genuinely trying to learn, or who are just trying to cruise through and be carried by their team. The latter do not last long if I have anything to do with it.
My field is cyber security, not development, but I feel like I get to "fuck around" with computers all day. I'm so lucky that I have a job which I enjoy so much that also rewards so well financially. I still pinch myself when I think that people actually pay me to do this for a living.
I deal with a lot of work that's really similar to puzzle solving. "Why did this occur? Is it normal behaviour or malicious?" and then I get to do deep dives trying to figure out why something happened. If I find malicious behaviour I get to go into incident response mode and boot out a bad guy. If I find a false positive I get to do some engineering to figure out how to avoid this while still maintaining the purpose of the original rules (while also minimising system overhead for the rule processing). The kicker is there are a LOT of companies willing to pay me a LOT of money to do this. I'm so incredibly lucky.
Super cool: security is such a fascinating field. One of the things I love about software is that there's _so many_ interesting and different directions one can go, depending on your own interests and predilections.
Either way though, security is incredibly important. You're doin' the lord's work.
I'm interested in this field, as I relate to your mentality of finding it interesting and losing myself and sense of time trying to solve puzzles. If I wanted to go into cyber security, what would you say one should learn/do?
Over the years I've become a little cynical when I see people asking "should I become a developer?" Because, on one hand, you are right. It changed my life in a positive way. But I've also realized how many people think, essentially, that they take a two-week course and they get a six-figure job where they fuck around all day. Not so much!