Conquering Imposter Syndrome: From Job Hopping to Career Growth at a Fortune 500 Company

And this social media era, we hear a lot about job hopping to get the bag, do this and do that, stay here six months a year and you can do whatever you want to do. But what if I told you that you can get the bag without job hopping? Today, I'm going to talk to you guys about what my career was like at the first company that really saw me for the valuable asset I am. Stay tuned. This video is being sponsored by Riverside. When I'm going to record a remote podcast, I use Riverside, and here's why you should, too. Since 2020, we've seen the rise of remote podcasts using various software like Zoom, streamyard, restream, but what I want to tell you is that Riverside is the go, and let me tell you why Riverside is so simple. We want to get to join your studio. You just send them a link. Riverside also has the best recording quality by recording locally on your machine, so you don't have to worry about jumbled up quality when it's time to edit your podcast. Riverside has a studio that you can do everything in. Riverside can transcribe your video, riverside can complete your podcast and it can also make you short rills, clips and seconds. With this magic AI feature. Riverside records superb audio multiple tracks. It also houses all your past recordings in the cloud in the studio so you can access them anytime, whenever, wherever. If you're interested in getting your start using Riverside, please use my code TixallTalk to get 15% off your purchase. All right guys, welcome back to episode 108 of the TixallTalk podcast, the best tech and careers podcast on YouTube right now. It's me, your host, hd, and you know very certainly I come to you guys with some introspective, retrospective, whatever the word is. I come back to you guys and I talk to you about things that I've experienced in my career, things that should be able to. That's helped me, that can help you, and that's what I want to talk about today. 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So, for those of you that aren't aware, in 2018, I got laid off on my first cybersecurity job, which was a sock analyst at McAfee, and it took me about five to six months to find out the role. So I started my second role in June of 2018 at Optif and I told you guys a little bit of the story about doing the interview process and also how we had a pretty much kind of audition for the client. My team was brought on for this major contract for a big Fortune 500 company. It might be even Fortune 50, and I won't say the name, but they are known for their theme parks. Just think that. Maybe, maybe, that's all right. I can definitely say I didn't say who they were, but the premise of this video is going to be about. This is probably the longest job I stayed at where I got the most value and really helped me get to where I'm at now, and that's what we're going to talk about in this video. So we started the job in 2018 June. I was also currently in grad school at the time, so it was like two things going on doing grad school and also had a new job. Now, for you guys that are listen, I'm going to be really candid here. Starting this job, I was very nervous why, you may ask, because the previous job didn't show me much, so I was dealing with some imposter syndrome. Actually, the exercise that we did for the client and we passed a flying colors really helped resolve a lot of that. So when I get to this company, it's different. We're not remote at the time. This is 2018 so of course, we're going into the office and this is my first time doing a role like this. I was working with the SOC. Specifically, we're actually called the Fusion Center and we have one major client, and so this is my first time having people to I would say like report to, or not just report to but working with a client Like that was like the first time it was happening, like having counterparts over there that I could reach out to, that we were working in their environment but on our machines we had to RDP into a lot of those things. One of the things I did at this job was I took it by the horns. I came in and I said you know what I mean business Like. Matter of fact, my first day I came in with some pleated slacks and I think I like a yellow polo shirt or something like that was tucked in. I was just like hey, it's regular wear. And one of the other managers at the time he was the manager over the engineers he asked me was out in the military and I'm shooting this on Veterans Day right now. So salute to all the veterans, thank you for your service. I was like no, I'm not in the military, I just I was in shape when I was laid off. I was trying to wake up in the morning three to four times a week and I was working out, going to run, just doing anything to keep my mind. First, stay sharp. If you attack this and this, you'll be all right. I said you know what I'm going to make an impact. So, at the job, one of the first things that they're asking us about is what she's going to do. I said you know what? I don't got no kids, I ain't got nothing, no-transcript. And I also volunteered to work the cut over when we took over. We take over the contract. So we were all there for a month before we took over the contract. So we took over the contract July 1st 2018 at 12 am and, man, that was crazy. That's probably like one of the more exhilarating things I've been a part of, in a sense, that most of us didn't have access. We had. Well, it was like three or four of us in there that night. I think Richard and I were working nights and then, I think, mark and somebody else None of us knew it. Like, this is what I tell you all Some stories that you typically not going to hit from somebody. But we didn't know not necessarily what we were doing, but we had not been in an environment long enough to know what we were supposed to do. Like probably about just a week before earlier that week, we just got our access. The current company that was the supplier tried to pretty much sabotage us with the contract. So what we did was and this is a good learning space for anybody who goes into a new environment, you don't know what to do. We had access to look at old tickets, documentation, all these other things, and so that's kind of how we figured out what we send here, what we send there. The good thing was we didn't have any issues. The client was very impressed about our diligence. And I say that first week I think I said I worked about what? 50 hours, maybe 55 hours, I don't know. I just I said you know, I just want to make sure like we good, like we're still hiring people for the team, and I was hungry. I was like I'm finna, I'm finna, do some here. This is the kind of role and to my black people or people color it was just say minorities in like cyber or IT, whatever you want to look at it, you know people like to love to come to the comments and say silly stuff to me all the time. This was one of the first times where everybody got to start at the first like, the like, the same starting line. So the first time for me in my careers and that's like people don't know Most of the time you go into an environment and you trying to play catch up, but if you get to start where everyone else is, you really can shine if you like that and I'm like that. So I started off on night shift and I only did night shift, probably for one. I'm going to say I was finished with night shift right before I graduated from grad school. Yeah, I think I was only on there for like a quarter and then they pulled me off because I made myself valuable to my team, to my client. I'm talking about coming in like I said like, uh, you've got LeBron or Chris Paul or Steph hard, any good distributor or somebody who can make up for the efficiency that you may have in your team. That was me. I was, you know, checking emails all the time and I was just planning this. We're planning that, saying, hey, this documentation is messed up, I edited this, I did that, I did this, I did that. All these different things to where the client was like, hey, we need him on days. And one of the things I also want to talk about too in this episode is why having a good manager can really make or break your career. Managers don't only manage you, they're also supposed to empower you and make sure that you're being utilized to the best of your ability and shout out. I'll shout out Ashley so many times. Shout out to Ashley. Ashley, if you ever see this, you know you're supposed to come on the show, so we got to bring you on the show so we can talk about this a little bit more in depth. But that's what Ashley was for me. Ashley was seeing. Well, it was kind of like both of us like she was coming in. She came in like she started. She didn't start when we did. She started a little bit right after us. So she was coming in, we were coming in. We were all just trying to do so many changes for the client. All this different stuff that was messed up. I'm talking about finding. We were finding. Like before I left in 2021, I was still finding different stuff out about that environment. That's how big it was, but she saw me doing a lot of good work and empowered me. This came from putting me on different projects, telling people that I was working on or he did this, he did that, all those different things and putting me in positions to, of course, make her look good, but make me look good as well. Now, if I would have just got there and left in 2019 to middle 2019, I could have went and got like more money. Now it's getting paid. Don't get me wrong about that. But one of the things I'm talking about. This is a gem for you guys, and some of you guys struggled with this. When you come to me for a resume and it's why you can't move on, you're chasing the money, but you didn't chase skills or tangible things that you help solve at your company, that you can talk about in interviews. See, the easiest way for me to do your resume is if you have accomplishments, things that you did, big projects that you did big things that you find out, discover or you help with. I could talk about those in your project and sell your market. You. When you're constantly just job hopping and not doing any of those things, sure, you're going to make more money, but eventually you're going to plateau and you're going to be stuck Meanwhile. Sometimes the person that did three, four years at that company, that got to move around at the company, did so many more things than you that, yeah, initially you made more money than them in the beginning, but now they've passed you because they are qualified to do roles that you're not qualified for and y'all got the same amount of years in the game. What's the little quote? They say you think is small, you think big. You got to sometimes think past Now, like sometimes you got to have tunnel vision. I'll stop my this of my episode with destiny having tunnel vision and not paying attention to everything that's around you. You got to look right here sometimes and focus on this. But those job descriptions and interviews to let you know if you don't know, if you're just job hopping to the same roll, that's easy. It's easy to job hop to the same roll. Of course you don't get more money, but what are you learning? Because you'll get to that role and say, man, I did this already, what am I achieving? And then you maybe at the company that's not gonna let you move around. So these are some of the things they don't tell you about. When it comes to job hopping, it's always job hop, get your money or whatever. Now understand, if you got a family, you got all this other stuff and you just need you need the money completing Projects and tasks. Getting paid for them at work is greater than doing it in your free time. So if you can say hey, I help this company. Decrease false positives decrease phishing, decrease social engineering by 50% by putting in email blocks, by security awareness training, by blocking Certain even type of email. I'm just making this up on the go. I didn't write down this. Look down if you ever say that or you say hey, I contributed to tuning and threat detection of these rules using threat intelligence reports, working with the engineering team, working with the Intel team, working with vulnerability management team A lot of the things you'll see in in the job screen to say collaborating with different teams and doing this and doing that. You'll see that a lot. So that's what I'm telling you. You have to be somewhere. Well, I'll take a step back. The key to know when a job hopping not is if the company is gonna believe in you and they're moving along. Within Six months to a year, a year and a half. You're doing different things for me. That happened for me After my first quarter went on days. I got started getting more and more responsibility and I'm pretty sure that people there on my team felt the way a little bit about. Maybe they thought I was kissing up, but I wasn't. I wasn't the people. That was there with me like a taehyun work with me. He's been on the show days, been on show, they'll tell you guys, and I just really was doing my job when we was here. It was a drew, breeze and shine paid with me, and actually that's what it was. I just did my job at a high level, and so did she, and that helped us out like that. Here's the thing, guys. When we're working, it's not just about Shoot them up, bang, bang. I'm in cybersecurity, I'm mr Robot, I can do this, I can do that. It's not just about that. It's also about how we make sure we're keeping the in this case, the company we're supporting, how we keep them safe right, how do we keep them safe? How we make sure that business operations are not interrupted. And so, whether you thought what I was doing was small or I'm just doing the most, I was making sure that none of those things ever happened, and making sure that didn't happen makes the client happy, helps us we. I think when we first got the contract I think it was all supposed to be with for three years or something like that within like a what a year, a couple months in, they renegotiated. Matter of fact, they still got the contract to the day. You know why? Because they still have people in there that care about the end goal. Andre was one of the other managers and he brought us in before we started say, hey, guys, I want you to know, like, remember, our job affects a lot of other people's livelihoods. So you, a lot of times when I'm going through the breaches and I'm breaking them down, that's one thing I think people are not forgetting I mean remembering is that our job focus on a lot of people's livelihoods. So that is why another way, why I say, hey, cyber security is Serious, you have to pay attention. You can't just go in there and play, because you got to understand what you do affect everybody. We get a big breeze. They got to spend billions of dollars, people getting laid off. They got to make the money back some type of way, whereas you be compliant, hey, you see something that you don't recognize. If you don't understand it, let somebody else know so they can look at it. These are simple things, but they can assure people don't lose their job. It's the holiday times now, so, no, it's no telling what's going on. Those people at octa or mr Cooper just got hit. Boeing got hit. I forgot who else I just saw there's a lot of companies getting hit right now. I know I just went on the tangent, but this is why I try to connect the real world To what I talk about in this channel, what I talk about the guests on the channel. We're talking about cybersecurity related content. This is what we're talking about. Like, our silo is, yeah, we're having fun, we're looking live, but no, how's it dictating everything else? At octave, I was able to go from just being a regular threat analyst which is another fancy term for sock analysts to the lead and we had a big team. So that mean I was and I wasn't over them. We are contemporaries. But one of the things I had learned in leadership was, initially, we all had this group message we were in and that's when I was like on the same levels and far as like just responsibility wise. And Then, once I started getting that leadership Responsibility or actually started, you know, dictating certain things for me that I need to do, or check on this, or tell this person this or that, I had to start disassociating myself with them, not at work, but in the chat to where they have to realize, okay, I did this for a reason. So you guys are respect whenever I tell you something and not oh, he's just telling me something. Are you interested in starting your career in the cloud? Well, that's you, then I got some for you. Level up and tech is a comprehensive 24-week program Guarantee to help you land a high-paying role in the cloud. Some of the skills that they teach you in level up and tech are server config and troubleshooting, aws infrastructure as code, ci, cd scripting, containerization and more. Level up and tech has helped over 800 people Start their career in the cloud. So if you're interested in the program, click the link in my bio, click on the tech resources and click on start your cloud career. So I had to do that. But those experience like I apply the jobs now at a time and they say you know must have experience leading the team, must have experience setting up these beans. So while I was a lead, all these other skills I have to do after the work on special projects. I got to drive different initiatives when it came to rule detections and correlation searches, tuning one of the biggest things I still talk about today and One of the things I always talk about in interviews when I'm doing like a interview for a lead role or some of the security operations or isn't in response, or even I've interviewed for management type of roles and sec ops and IR I talk about. One of the biggest things I helped do was a QA program for the analysts. Now to you that may be small, but it's actually big. Most of us in security operations know most of the time the high and the critical alert is not the alert that got us. Most of the time it's the medium and low that fire before the high and critical that we missed and that's what led to the breach. So the QA was just to make sure hey, we are handling every alert like we need to and not just disregarding it because it's a low and a medium. And by doing this this did help us get to a certain analyst score overall. It also tied in to helping them get better bonus money, but it helped us give the customer better service. And that's like a you have to start situation, task, action, result. That's a star answer. When you job hop you're not gonna have a lot of answers that you can write for your start method. A lot of times those are the questions like when they start action, when the interviewers start action, these different things. Tell me by the time, or can you show us about this or what about this when you had all these different projects? That's how you do it by staying somewhere. That's valuing you. Now, key word, guys value, not a place. That's not valuing you. That's not letting you move around, that's keeping you down, that's underpaying you. That's not letting you learn. No increased responsibilities. Like for me. Within the next year, I got to go to a SplunkConf and I went to Burbank on the company dime. So I was doing a lot of stuff. But back on the tangent of back to the job that job I got to expand my network. Some of the people that I met now have bigger titles at other companies that now I could tap in if I'm interested in working over there. That's one of the things I could do. That's one of the crazy things that I could do. Also, I got to get my hands on a lot of tools. It's hard to say. You probably like master something or very good at something. If you went from job to job. It made me start using different tool stacks everywhere. Like for me for three years. I use Splunk, phantom, tanium, crowdstrike, mcafee, epo, trend Micro and, of course, we had a large AWS environment. So now the jobs are saying, hey, we want somebody that's familiar with monitoring an enterprise environment in the cloud AWS or Azure, gcp. Hey, I've did that for what? Six, seven years now and I can show you, I can show you in my resume all these things I did, what I helped with, how I came in with these processes, how I did this, how I did that. Yeah, I also want you guys to realize as much as technical cyber is is also non-technical, and that's even in the technical roles. The security engineers will tell you about how they have to do this in JIRA, how they have to do that. It's a lot of different things that's going on. How am I able to break down something technical and tell the stakeholders Are we hitting our KPIs? Are we making sure we're making SLAs? How those things matter Not to you, but it's mattering to them because they're trying to say, hey, what are we actually paying for here? So that's why you can't be at your job and that's why you got to understand these things. Hey, where are these things located? Where are they measured? How are we doing we? Also, I think they figured out a way to figure out how many alerts per hour each analyst need to work so they wouldn't be fatigued. Now, through this company, I did get to experience a couple of breaches. They weren't anything big or anything like that, but I did do that. However, for one of the breaches, I was one of the persons sounding the alarm. Knowing your environment is the key when you're working security operations. So I knew my environment and I was telling them hey, my guy's not doing this right. That's all I was telling them. If you don't want to believe me, then it is what it is. Watch what happens when we do not take care of this the way we should. And they had a big breach Well, not big, where you knew, on a news article. It was just like internally big. It wasn't too much. That happened. But because of that we had to downsize the team. We had to get rid of some people to let the client know hey, we want to continue to support you. We always want to have the best analysts on the team so we can give you the best service. So that happened at the job. Then we got some new people and one of the people he's like listen, man, y'all be talking about me. Dayspring, is that? Him and Tavion are those guys? Man, I'm just here, I'm just. It's like I'm the old head and I was like they better than me, they are. That's what I tell people all the time too. It's like you can learn things and you can outpace the people that you're currently working with. I tell people all the time you got people that's just gonna be there working and going home. That's all they're gonna do, which they might be at that stage in their life. Now for you, if you're not at the stage in your life, you gotta put in the work, you gotta put in the work. So, to round out some things that we went through there that also helped me was that I got to learn from one of the best principal analysts I've ever worked with. This guy was a Swiss Army knife. I got to learn from him. So, also, network is important when it comes to working. Having somebody like that that knows how to do a little bit of everything that you can just reach out to is perfect or saying, hey, I did all this, but I got here what, what am I missing? And he'll show me. And now I took all that knowledge and now I know it. And that's another way that I gain trust to everyone else, because I was willing to say, hey, I tried all these things and I do not understand. Like, what am I missing? To come to my conclusion, can you show me it showed? Hey, this person understands, like he's not trying to. He knows what he knows. He knows what he doesn't know, and he used to tell me, hey, tell the other guys that they don't know something, ask me they would not. So some of the simple things are just speaking up. It's what helps you. Like, for me, I will always be one of the many people talking on our shift turnovers and that stands out. I'm sending emails or I'm in the email chain with the directors and the managers. Simple stuff, man. Simple stuff. In basketball, you make the right pass. If you're ever talking football, you might not think it's big, but I'm a running back. We dropped that pass coverage and I blocked the guy that's running free and I might not even put him on the ground. I might have held him up for two seconds, but that two seconds let my quarterback throw a touchdown pass. That's what we're talking about Simple, yet effective plays. You got to do the same thing when it comes to work. Got to do the same thing when it comes to work. I don't really care about it because I'm not a recruiter, but some managers will look at if you move around so much sometimes, if it's not contract or you don't have, like, your own company, and they'll probably start passing on you sometimes because you move around so much and they'll want to know why can't you just stay somewhere a little bit? Why have it been somewhere at least two years? Because most people aren't going to be at a company longer than two years. If they do, it's amazing. Or they have a family or they're at a place in their life where they can just be there. But if you're not doing that, then hey. So my advice to you is, like I said, find a role, and this is why when you interview, you're not only getting interviewed but you're interviewing them. See what the person in the role previous to you or whether it's vacant Like what are they doing that? Did they leave? Did they get promoted? Do people on this team get promoted? Figure out all these different things. Figure out how they want to invest into your education, what they pay for sales, what they send you to conferences. These things are, even though they're not in your salary. These are things you could probably say actually just cost money, like Sands is expensive. So a company pays for you to do Sands. That's a big time investment. They send you to a conference, like I just went to Splunk Conf. Again that was what Thousands of dollars, 3000, 2000, 3000? I don't know. I don't do the thing because I think our ticket was free, because we are a company that had done business with them. But my room was free and my room was a very nice room, that I might add. But that's what I'm saying. These are the things you got to look into. Like the money is cool, but when that is your only motivating factor, once you can't get the money you think you deserve and want, now what do you want to do? Do you actually like doing what you're doing Because it's hard to study stuff? You don't like what you're doing just because you're getting paid a lot. I don't think a lot of people talk about that. This is a field where I can't like technically, if I just want to say, okay, I'm going to go home and I'm just going to do my work and I'm telling me to do that, but then I would never go farther, I would never be able to do more than what I want to do, I will only be in that role, and so that's the issue. If you're telling everybody to just chase the money, chase the money but don't let it make you. Don't let the money, because what happens is the money will also put you in bad position. The money will make you take a job you know you shouldn't take, and I feel like I did that in one of my last roles. The company was great, the money was a little bit more base than I was getting at the previous company, but I didn't really vet it like I should have. I was just so happy to leave. I didn't say, okay, what exactly am I going to be doing on a day to day? If I were to figure that out, I would have never left. I would just suck it up and went somewhere else. And so that's why you got to realize and that's what that's me. Being honest, we've all taken jobs just for the money. The money is cool. The last job I've made more than what I made now, and I was miserable. Y'all seen me talk about that, and so that's another thing when people talk about all that job hopping, being miserable, hanging on to work, like people have told me, like when I put on that video how much I was making and I quit and people were saying I would have did that forever. Okay, you would, but you'll be miserable. You don't have to do a job you don't want to do and that's any job. We got running people, fast food and retail. They got attitudes. Ain't nobody tell you to work here, and so that's what you got to realize. Ain't nobody tell you to work and try to do your job and do this and that. But what I want you to take away from this conversation is that you can do all you need to do, sometimes at one company to where it propels you to go where you really want to go. Name recognition is important. What you'll be doing is important If you're working in an emerging technology or you can say, hey, I helped, like. One of the things I have on my resume is like I helped take my socks maturity level from a one, two or three. That's a big claim because maturity is a big thing. In the side, you'll be surprised what people aren't mature and what people are mature. When hiring manager see that they say, oh my gosh, that's a person that's helpful Cause that don't only mean that I did my work good. I was doing good at other things, and so that's what I'm telling you. I can. I could never say that if I was just what. I got the octave and left Just cause you know, at octave I think I started off with what 78 K bass and then I think before I left I was making like one, 10 or 15 or something like that. But and that's also cause my manager is looking out for me she helped me get better than 3% raises every year. I was getting like seven, 8% raises every year when I was there. That's not normal, that's not normal. And that's why I like shout out to her, because I was putting in the work to get that she was. If she could've gave me 15%, she probably would have. You see what I'm saying. But on the opposite, I could have said, okay, let me get sitting there, oh, this next job, and it paid me 95. But I'm doing the same exact role, with less responsibility and no ways to make the change that I want to. So had I did that, that would have been my issue. And then I was like thank you, I'm so. I've been working in the sock. I didn't do this and I'm like well, what have you done. But I appreciate y'all for just for listening to me and rockin' me. I just wanted to talk to the audience, like another part of the cybersecurity career series, also part of the textual talk, but these are the ones where I just get my back. I talk to y'all the stuff that I can't say when I'm on there with the guests, cause I don't always want to poke around the conversation. Y'all hear me talk enough and I just always like to tap back in which y'all, so y'all can listen to me. But if you're still here and you need career help, click the link in the bio. Let's set up a consultation. If you need your resume done, I got you. I'm probably gonna take a pause on doing some more coaching and consultations, probably in December. I've been working so hard. I wanna use the last little bit of the holidays for the family. So when you see this, if you really need some help ASAP, go ahead and book so we can go ahead and knock it out and join the Patreon. You can donate. Donate links are in the description. Make sure you join my mailing list too. I got some announcements for you guys. I'm gonna be up into any of my mailing lists and really giving you guys a free game and everything else. But like your boy always says, your boy HD stay textual and I'm out peace.