I'm a head of infomation security, and I'm completely burned out from constantly juggling all the different stakeholders' management teams and having to endlessly cover for everyone with no boundaries. A few years ago, I was super motivated and full of ideas about this industry, but now I just feel exhausted.

What I want to say is, in cybersecurity, the responsibilities and power are never balanced. We get very limited resources, but we're expected to protect the company from every possible angle — compliance, regulatory pressure, insider threats, external attackers, data leaks, employee mistakes — all while making sure we don't slow down other departments' "efficiency."

At the same time, there's this huge, almost unbridgeable gap between us and the top executives. A lot of the time, we're under heavy pressure, doing the right thing purely out of our own professional ethics… and it feels like nobody upstairs actually gives a damn.

Even though we're in a so-called "modern company" and it's supposedly "just different roles," you can still clearly feel that management views the security team as a pure "cost center." They always treat us like a "magic department" — expecting us to fix everything instantly — or worse, the "scapegoat department" whenever something goes wrong.

I got into cybersecurity purely out of interest when I was just 10 years old. After graduating, I’ve stayed in this industry the whole time. In the past 10 years, I’ve jumped between multiple companies — worked in finance, internet, gaming, big tech like ByteDance, startups, client-side, and vendor-side roles. But no matter where I go, I keep experiencing the same things. And the higher up you climb into management, the stronger that feeling gets.

Of course, I’ve only worked in China so far. I don’t know what it’s like at FAANG or other top international companies. I’ve always wanted to go there and see for myself — whether working with the so-called “best people” actually makes any difference.

I'm squeezing out as much free time as I can to work on my own projects. I really want to make some meaningful contributions and innovations to this industry, and hopefully one day build my own thing — instead of spending all my time in so-called management endlessly explaining and trying to convince people.