Is cybersecurity a good career? - SecurityMadeSimple.org (2024)

Why cybersecurity isn’t a good career?

Stress: If you work in cybersecurity, many times you’re being called on when things aren’t going well. Also, many times you’re going to need to ask people to do things that go outside of their normal business operations and their not going to be happy about that because they feel as though you’re trying to tell them what to do. Also, it’s not something that shows up on their bottom line/evaluations so they want to put as little time into security work as possible. This can be frustrating when you’re trying to do your job and the people who you need are making things difficult. To mitigate that, it’s important that you work for companies/clients that give you the proper authority to do your job, otherwise it’s always going to be a struggle.

Technology Focused: Cybersecurity is a technology based field, so even though you talk to people it’s not something where you’re going to get a lot of interpersonal interactions outside of business related conversations. If you’re someone that likes working with people, you like creating deep bonds with people than cybersecurity probably isn’t a good option for you.

Overtime: This depends on the company you’re working at, but whenever a data breach happens or there is a possibility of one happening you can be expected to work a lot of overtime hours and depending on your position you may be expected to work for no extra pay or at least no overtime pay. These types of situations that demand overtime aren’t too common but it’s something to consider if you’re someone that really values work life balance.

No one wants to pay for it:

In most companies cybersecurity is a cost center, which means it’s something that costs the business money and doesn’t generate any revenue. From a financial point of view it’s a necessary evil to do business and as a result it can be difficult to sell it to people inside and outside of the company. If you’re a cybersecurity sales engineer you may find that it’s hard to sell services to people outside of the company because they want to spend as little money as possible. If you’re an employee it can difficult to convince management to set aside a budget for hiring new staff or buying licenses for software that you need to secure the company. The main reason being is that you’re not going to make any money from that investment, which is the point of having a business. The exception to this rule is if you work for a company that sells cybersecurity products or services, then you’re seen as a profit center and you get much less push back when you say you need something. Over the last few years with an increased awareness of how often companies get hacked and how much it can cost, this problem is definitely decreasing. Companies are much more likely to invest in cybersecurity than they were previously but just because of the nature of the service (it doesn’t generate profit) you can always expect some resistance and find companies that just want to do the minimum to keep things going.

Final Thoughts

Cybersecurity definitely has a strong upside as a potential career path. It offers the chance to make good money, you have a low chance of going unemployed for any extended period of time, you can work from home to save time and money on commuting and it’s relatively easy to get into compared to other high paying careers. However, this isn’t everything. For some people working with computers and having to deal with angry, frustrated and panicked managers/clients isn’t something they want to worry about. Also, some people may want a career that is more social or more fulfilling so that’s something that I would say isn’t high in cybersecurity or tech in general. Overall, cybersecurity is good for people that want to make good money, don’t need a ton of socialization on the job and enjoy solving logic based problems.