I lean toward “efficient entertainment”, but I do sometimes wonder what that chunk of my free time would look like otherwise.

  • Jo Miran
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    3 months ago

    The ability to see the entirety of an environment as a single entity, find synergistic relationships and figure out how to exploit those relationships to force a system to do something it was not designed to do. Like those people that make really niche character builds that suck 99.99% of the time but given this unique set of environmental variables it will suddenly hit you with infinite fireballs with one million points of crit damage or something like that.

    The problem is that a mind like that is one requirement, another is years of experience (been there, done that, I know what that is) and really deep and wide knowledge in the field, which is also very hard to find. Finding someone with all of them is like finding a jedi unicorn. These are the people that make very high six or low seven figure salaries.

    I’m being relatively vague on purpose.

      • Jo Miran
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        3 months ago

        Just being cautious about security non-disclosure agreements. It is possible to inadvertently disclose client vulnerabilities by discussing how certain specific skills are necessary, how precarious certain environments are and how fragile they can be without said skills. It is also possible to alert bad actors to the fact that certain skill sets are a weak link in certain client’s infrastructure.

        If you are a teenager with a very strong knack for synergy, build crafting, etc., please consider pointing your obsessive mind towards technology (not software development or tech support).

        Imagine enterprise level applications as complex living organisms where one insignificant misconfiguration in a peripheral and, as far as everyone was concerned, unrelated system can snowball into bringing down and entire service provider. Sure, someone will eventually do an incident investigation and maybe figure out what went wrong back then, but it is far more valuable to have people that can look at a set seemingly unrelated and not at all concerning metrics and flag the lot as a priority action item BEFORE the system crashes. It seems like black magic fuckery to some, but what it really is about is a combination of deep and wide knowledge of all moving parts related to the application, experience, and the ability to think holistically and understand the synergies.