Latest essay
AI and the first IT job
AI is not removing junior IT jobs. It is removing the scripted version of the first rung, and replacing it with a role that rewards judgement, context and ownership.
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Roles19 Sept 2026 5 min
Perspectives
The parts of this industry nobody tells you.
Two collections, one publication. Career Perspectives for the people building careers. Hiring Perspectives for the people trying to fill roles. Each group leads with a verdict. The essays underneath show the working.
30 essays published, 11 in progress.
Career Perspectives
For people building careers.
Certifications, roles, career change, and where the industry is heading. Written for the person trying to make the next move without burning eighteen months on the wrong one.
Certifications, honestly7 essays
Choose certifications for the role and stage you are targeting, with a clear view of what they can and cannot demonstrate.
Why Security+ is simultaneously overrated and useful
Security+ can support applications where the credential is requested. It does not guarantee screening success or demonstrate the practical work on its own.
24 May 20265 minIs CISSP actually worth it in 2026?
Yes, but only for a specific person at a specific moment. For everyone else it's 12–18 months optimising for the wrong thing.
24 May 20265 minI passed CISSP and nothing happened, and that's fine
The six-month silence after passing is the cert doing exactly what it's supposed to, on a slower clock than LinkedIn implies. Here's when 'nothing happened' is normal, and when it's the market telling you something useful.
30 May 20265 minWhen everyone passes, nobody differentiates
Exam dumps aren't mainly an ethics problem. They're a signal erosion problem. And that hurts honest candidates too.
27 May 20265 minWhen you can't earn experience, cert stacking becomes the trap
If your current role won't let you touch the work you're trying to move into, stacking certs feels like the only lever. Past the second one, you stop buying progress and start buying the appearance of it.
1 Jun 20266 minThe certification didn't get you into cyber, the signal did
The cyber or GRC cert changes your position in the hiring system, not your capability inside it. Filter-first, evaluate-later is how the market actually runs, and the candidates who understand that build different things in parallel.
17 Jun 20265 min
Inside the roles10 essays
Understand the work, expectations and trade-offs behind a title before choosing your next move.
The realistic SOC analyst path
Most guides describe the job a SOC analyst wishes they had. Here's the one they actually do.
24 May 20266 minWhy security architects are always the bad guys
We're not blocking your project. We're the last function in the room, asked to underwrite promises we were never invited to help shape.
28 May 20265 minAI and the first IT job
AI is not removing junior IT jobs. It is removing the scripted version of the first rung, and replacing it with a role that rewards judgement, context and ownership.
19 Sept 20265 minWhy most people should start in IT support
Not because it's prestigious. Because it installs the operational instincts every later role quietly assumes you already have, and skipping it is what makes year two so painful.
15 Jun 20265 minThe cloud engineer myth
"Cloud engineer" is not the entry-level job the bootcamps pretend. The role advertised under that title in 2026 is a mid-level infra engineer with cloud on top, and the cert-stack candidates aren't being rejected for missing a cert.
15 Jun 20265 minWhat a Tier 2 SOC analyst actually does at 2am
Mostly judgment under uncertainty, with imperfect tools, on systems you don't fully own, while three people who shouldn't be in the call are in the call. That's the job. The training material describes a different one.
15 Jun 20266 minThe GRC timing trap
GRC is one of the best mid-to-late-career destinations in security and one of the worst early-career landings. The trap isn't the work. It's that GRC pulled too early severs you from the credibility GRC actually runs on, silently.
15 Jun 20264 minThe mid-career architect trap
Taking an architect title at a firm that doesn't actually run architecture as a discipline is one of the cleanest-looking moves available and one of the hardest to undo. The pay rise is now. The empty CV is year nine.
15 Jun 20264 minTen years in, the things that actually compounded
The certs, the talks, the framework adoption everyone fussed over for six weeks. Most of it went flat. What compounded was operational scars, written documents, and a small number of strong relationships. The boring list.
15 Jun 20264 min
Career change5 essays
Weigh the route, time and evidence involved in changing careers, including when a move may be the wrong choice.
The problem isn't age. It's expectation compression
Career changers don't fail because they're too old. They fail because they try to compress a six-year arc into eighteen months, and quit when the compression doesn't hold.
30 May 20266 minWhy most career-change advice breaks at the first interview
Most career-change content is written for the spreadsheet stage, not the interview. The interview tests two things the advice never names, and that's where the plan tends to fail.
30 May 20267 minIs a computer science degree worth it in the UK?
For a specific route, yes, and it's still one of the best bets going. For most people asking the question, no. Here's the tradeoff nobody selling either route wants to put this cleanly.
18 Jul 20267 minWhen changing careers into tech is a bad call
Most career-change content assumes the move is correct and only argues about route. The assumption is wrong often enough to matter. Four situations where moving into tech in 2026 is the wrong call, three of which are common.
15 Jun 20264 min
Industry and specialisms5 essays
Explore how technology and specialisation change the work and the routes into it.
What AI actually does to pentesting
AI won't kill offensive security. It will hollow out the middle of it, and quietly decommission the apprenticeship that produced the next generation of seniors.
29 May 20267 minThe real bottleneck in cybersecurity careers
It isn't certs and it isn't labs. It's operational time on systems other people depend on. Until you've had that, you're stuck below a ceiling no exam or home lab can lift you over.
15 Jun 20266 minWhy networking is still underrated
Less crowded than cloud or security, hiring at the junior level when most adjacent fields aren't, and the sleeper feeder route for the higher-paid disciplines five years later. Going out of fashion is precisely why it's a good bet.
15 Jun 20265 minMost people should not target offensive security first
The offensive-first route is presented as a default and behaves like a low-probability bet. The pentesters doing work clients actually pay full rate for came up through defensive and infra. The detour is faster than the direct route.
15 Jun 20264 min
Hiring Perspectives
For recruiters, hiring managers and talent teams.
Why technical roles stay open, and what the market actually does behind the polite language of job specs. Same publication, same voice, different audience.
Hiring failure modes1 essay, 6 in progress
Examine the assumptions in a hiring brief and the practical changes that could widen a credible candidate pool.
Industry behaviours2 essays
Look at the incentives, signals and trade-offs that shape hiring and contracting decisions.
Not available yet11 essays are being written. Nothing in this list can be read today. Open it if you want to see what is coming.
Cloud engineering isn't entry-level anymore
In progressThe market that hired junior cloud engineers in 2019 doesn't exist. What replaced it, and the realistic path in.
The hidden downside of a GRC career
In progressGRC is one of the calmest, best-paid entries into security. It also quietly closes doors you may not realise you wanted open.
DevOps vs platform engineering. What actually changed
In progressIt isn't a rename. The hiring bar, day-to-day, and career ceiling are all different. Most candidates pick the wrong one.
Bootcamp vs self-taught. The question is wrong
In progressNeither route is the actual differentiator. What matters is the thing both routes leave out.
How people actually get their first job in cyber
In progressNot via the cert stack the influencers sell. Five real patterns, ranked by how often they work.
Invisible Feeders. Why the best IAM candidates rarely have IAM in their job title
In progressPart 2 of seven. The strongest IAM hires are sitting in platform, infra and identity-adjacent roles whose titles don't contain the word identity. Search by title and you miss them by design.
Tool Fetishism. When platform hiring mistakes tooling familiarity for engineering capability
In progressPart 3 of seven. Filtering for Terraform plus Argo plus Backstage plus a specific service mesh stops being a skills filter and becomes a brand filter. The candidates who pass the brand filter aren't always the ones who can build the platform.
Architecture Inflation. How Security Architect roles quietly become leadership positions
In progressPart 4 of seven. The title says architect. The responsibilities describe a head of function. Senior candidates read the gap from the JD and withdraw by round two, and the brief blames the market.
SIEM Badge Syndrome. Why Detection Engineer searches collapse when platforms become proxies for skill
In progressPart 5 of seven. Asking for three named SIEMs feels like a capability filter. It's actually a platform-tenure filter, and the engineers who think like detectors have gone deep on one platform, not wide across three.
Responsibility Dumping. When DevSecOps becomes a workaround for organisational ownership problems
In progressPart 6 of seven. Some DevSecOps roles exist because no one will own the security debt. The hire is being asked to paper over an org-chart problem, and the strongest candidates can smell it in round one.
Leadership Paradox. Why Security Manager briefs often exclude both managers and engineers
In progressPart 7 of seven. The JD asks for a manager who's still hands-on at IC depth. Each half of the pool reads itself out, and the search ends up filtering for the candidate who's least sure which job they're doing.