It's also a matter of the market being saturated with unemployed people with paper certs, genuine competence, and some with both. The company I worked for sold out 5 months ago - I too have been looking ever since. I've made it a point to ask the recruiters/companies how much interest they've had in the position. The /typical/ response is "*gasp*, we've received over 1300 (thirteen hundred) resumes for this position in the past week, I only talk to the people who call to follow-up". Extremely frustrating to say the least. -- Blake Fithen fithen@pobox.com www.pobox.com/~fithen

-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Avleen Vig Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 10:39 AM To: LeBlanc, Jason Cc: 'Sean Donelan'; nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: How to get better security people

On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, LeBlanc, Jason wrote:

...

On that note, Etrade layed off their entire net sec team a few months back. I don't trade there no more. ;)

Fewer and fewer companies are paying attention to network security with the right mindset. They all want peopl who have been in the field for 7-10+ years, with 10+ years of general systems admin skills.

I'm 21. I have 5 years of combined network security and sysadmin experience. No-one is interested. I spent 5 months looking for a job, applied at at least a few hundred locations, only to be told each time that I didn't have enough experience.

I know around 100 other security admins, and I think 2 have that much experience.

It's semi-understandable when a MNC wants that kind of experience, but when your run of the mill start up wants to too, it gets rather sick. These people aren't going to get what they're looking for. They'll realise it too late I guess.

I dropped out of security and went back to sysadmining. I prefer the job I have now to any I've had in the past, and I wouldn't trade it for a security job with some of these firms in 10 lifetimes.

-- Av Go here, now - http://www.ircnetops.org/smurf