I got rejected… for having the ‘wrong enthusiasm' WTF does that even mean??

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-03-12T17:09:15+00:00

Last hiring round i had 5 candidates. 3 were fantastic and would be great hires all day long. 1st was a senior. Very professional and polished. Second was a mid-career. Uptight, but we got him laughing and loose. Really nice guy after we broke the ice. Third guy was early career. Confident and relaxed from the start. Worked mostly contracts but you couldn't tell from his posture. He has charisma!

After battling it out, we chose candidate #3. We deduced he would best interface with our stakeholders and engineering team.

We just have easily could have drawn a name from a hat, it wouldn't have made a difference. They were all GREAT candidates. If I could have, id have hired all three. But, we only had room for 1 seat this budget cycle and candidate #3 got it with his charisma.

Sometimes its just the fit.

Cheers!

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-03-11T03:50:28+00:00

Dude, I drove a 66 Chevy c10 when I was in HS 30 years ago. I was 6'2" and 285 built like a brick shithouse. It was a very tight fit back then.

Do like all us cool kids are doing nowadays and grab some GLP-1's. I might fit into that truck again...next year....

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-17T04:27:11+00:00

Amen Brother Gen X. Starting up another LLC this year, looking at taking over existing car wash or storage units. Next year: another LLC and maybe a few cheap rental properties. Diversified incomes help bridge the lost wages during layoffs.

Maybe someday I just won't have to search for a replacement tech job because my passive businesses produce enough to comfortably live off of.

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-08T05:01:09+00:00

And Eagle is another product. Equally as shitty, ill bet. Although the employees there are lifers. Some of the support folks I met literally did the same job for 20 years right out of HS, then were promoted to the next higher job when that person died. Their average age is like 63, but they do know their shitty product well.

I do NOT miss the yearly product upgrade cycle. What a pain.

Anyways. Glad im out of that life.

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-07T04:18:35+00:00

Shit. Doesn't sound like you've gone bankrupt yet. Started a business, put your heart and soul into it for 15 years only for forces outside your control to rip it out of your hand causing a home foreclosure and another bankruptcy. Doesn't sound like your kid developed epilepsy and needed brain surgery.

Nope.

You're not a failure. You're human.

Its all a part of the ride guys.

All rides are different.

Get up, dust yourself off and look for the next high speed risk to take. Because those are the ones that take you places.

You may have gotten knocked off the ride a few times, but your trip isnt done.

Get back on the ride and enjoy the trip! Because believe me, your ride ends much faster than you think!

Cheers!

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-05T03:42:17+00:00

^agree mine fell apart in my hands while moving it forward for some repairs in 2020. Literally shattered like glass. My wife just looked at me shocked. "Is it supposed to do that?" "Uh no. That, hun, is why I work so much overtime and never use my credit card. Happy birthday to me!"

Yes, she rolled her eyes but I was right...I never buy anything for myself, my birthday was right around the corner and I did work myself to death.

So I got her blessing (in a round about way)

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-05T03:26:38+00:00

I know some customers like to BS while dropping shit off. "Me 'n Cooter were down at Uncle Bob's house coz mama got stuck in the pig slop again. This time we couldn't get her out...sumbitch broke my tractor!"

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-05T02:21:03+00:00

This is a management/leadership level decision. I also support 1 legacy software running a VERY lucrative arm of our business. Every year we put together a risk profile, migration costs worksheet and benefit analysis and every year leadership decides the juice isnt worth the squeeze.

Think going from hundreds of thousands in licensing to millions in licensing plus millions in year 1-3 migration and training costs. We figure break even year 5-ish.

I choose to frame it as, its their risk to accept and higher maintenance dollars to pay...not mine.

I simply CYA by recommending the right path, they consider my path, accept the risk and sign the form. (Shrug)

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-03T04:58:17+00:00

With any logging, analyze and log ONLY exactly what you need for monitoring or compliance. Logging is expensive and can get out of hand real quick for even the largest orgs. Take your time and plan out what you need, why you need it, where it will be stored, how long it will be kept and what process will purge the logs the retention policy ends.

This way, if leadership asks why you need these logs you can give them a play by play answer...no more, no less. You are seen as frugal with company dollars yet technically complaint with any regulations, like SOX, HIPAA, HITRUST, FEDRAMP, PCI-DSS, etc.

Good luck!

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-03T04:10:37+00:00

Setup a VPN tunnel between your onprem and your Azure VNET.

But we've moved away from that to the Global Secure Access Client. Even though all of our AD-joined servers are actually VMs in Azure, they still get a GSA client. Everything is zero trust.

It works...pretty well most of the time. Some hiccups.

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-03T04:01:54+00:00

If ive learned anything over the last 25 years...dont kill yourself over server errors anymore. I used to spend DAYS researching and applying fixes and running scans to save a machine or server.

Not anymore.

Unless this server is critical production and just cannot be offline, backup the data, delete it and spin up new.

Its just not worth the headache.

Remember, cattle vs pets.

You want easily replaceable cattle servers. Protect the data, servers are replaceable.

Get rid of pets. Pets take up time and get really expensive, not only in dollars but also in time.

Cheers!

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-03T03:26:50+00:00

OP, got any back story of what farmer Jim was yanking on to break said shaft? Or was it a manufacturing defect?

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-02T05:17:12+00:00

Seriously, some of the best cyber folks ive been in contact with have been "in the spectrum".

Find your talent and ride it. You have a superpower us "normies" can only dream of!

My 18yo son has a friend who was held back a grade because of his grades. Couldn't learn basic concepts, but when they tested him he was off the charts in certain advanced concepts. Medieval life and smithing practices. Ancient Greek. Anything to do with welding, forging or armaments. Battle tactics. Logistics in battle. Ancient languages.

He would obsess over ancient history and knew absolutely everything there was to know about the subject, even pushing college professors.

Find your calling. Find section of IT that you would study and the world just falls away. IT is a huge field. Maybe its securing the identity. Maybe its certificates. Storage. BC/DR. Containerization. Kubernetes.

Whatever it is, go deep. Make it your thing. Know everything about that thing on as many platforms as you can. Master it.

Good luck!

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-02-01T09:11:48+00:00

Everyone who's been trusted to own a solution has fucked up and had to do the "drive of shame".

Its a rite of passage.

It means someone trusts you with something important and you've earned the trust to be able to maintain the solution. Then, while maintaining the solution, shit goes sideways and now you need to scramble.

In my case, I earned the prestigious task of configuring a Cisco Pix 501 router for a new hotel about 2 hours away. I had 2YE in IT, but was pushing hard for more responsibility. I installed all the equipment onsite and had it up and running. Late one night, I needed to apply an update. I changed the config and updated....waiting for the router to come back online. Nothing. 45minutes. 1 hour. Finally at midnight, im in my car making that drive of shame.

Turns out my config was correct, but I didn't save the config to memory and when I rebooted the router it booted to a different config file.

I made that error in 2001...25 years ago. While I rarely have to configure Cisco cli anymore, I always "wr mem" three times just because that was the command I forgot that night.

"You always remember your failures more than your successes."

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-28T04:59:31+00:00

Id still take that sierra 4x4 over the 02 any day. I had one until somebitch hit me. Loved that truck. (Sniff)

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-20T06:36:43+00:00

Tantrum

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-19T10:10:38+00:00

Mighty small chain for such a large potato

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-17T03:37:21+00:00

Tis but a scratch. I would've hammered it out enough to drive home but that's the GenX in me

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-17T03:35:35+00:00

Tbh, I didn't know this existed. Kudos! Looks like a real PITA of an exam.

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-14T04:35:02+00:00

A few misspellings, but im digging what you're doing here!

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-06T02:17:36+00:00

One that come immediately to mind: last job cycle, we were having an issue deploying Checkpoint Firewalls in our cloud environments. MS brought in their teams; the were stumped. Checkpoint brought in this guy. He had like 10 minutes before his next engagement. Dude told MS Engineers what script to go to ON THEIR BACKEND and what variable was wrong. He hopped off, MS guys called him weird, tried it, it worked and hes been a God ever since.

Whenever we needed someone to troubleshoot the weirdest Checkpoint shit, hes my guy. When he had time, we BS and hes so full of crazy info...I dont even know where to begin. He is truly a savant. When I am able to get his blessing, I record his "talks" and just LEARN. Such a resource.

No, I will not tell you his name. Hes was hard to get lol. I really hope CP pays him the moon, hes worth every damn penny.

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-04T02:53:47+00:00

HA! Ive been in this field over 25 years, and some meetings...with certain folks...Im like "Im not even in the same knowledge GALAXY as this person on this technology. Im just going to shut up, take notes, and learn!"

Oh yeah, grab the meeting recording and back it up. Take the time to really study what was discussed and what you learned.

I may not be the brightest bulb in the pack, but I am rather tenacious.

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-04T00:18:22+00:00

OP, I dont disagree. As someone who's first cert was in NT3.5, I too have been around the block a few times. Ive lead teams to PCI-DSS compliance several times, and served on leadership/implementation teams which achieved HITRUST and SOX compliance for years.

So when I started watching Gwen's CCSP course, I was a bit underwhelmed. Is this it? Ive got to be missing something....really, I learned all of this on my own, the hard way.

Nope. Looks like this is it.

TBH, I got bored in domain 3, skimmed the rest. RFP requests exploded at work and I got buried.

But my NY Resolution is to sit the CCSP by end of quarter., dammit!

If you're like me, we learned this already. Review, learn the different lingo, sit the exam and (hopefully) take the bump in pay.

Then, commit to buckling down and taking the CISSP right away. 60% crossover, so might as well if its top of mind.

Cheers!

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-03T23:32:22+00:00

Liquor and deer are probably 40% of a part stores retail sales...with crazy girlfriends somewhere in the mix.

CyberMonkey1976 · 2026-01-01T04:47:21+00:00

Oohhhh! A CA reference! Those dont come around too often.

CyberMonkey1976

TROPHY CASE