Ask HN: Should I Make the Pivot to Cybersecurity or Grow as a Software Engineer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I Make the Pivot to Cybersecurity or Grow as a Software Engineer?

7 pointsOulaX5 comments

DISCLAIMER: I live in Iraq, local software engineering jobs are rare around here, same goes with other IT specialties not just software engineers.

I'm 28, and I'm working as a fully-remote software engineer contractor for a US-based startup. This was my first ever software engineering job, and I started out as an intern, and now I'm a mid-level frontend engineer.

Work has been slow, and being a startup, I'm pretty sure funding will soon end, and I will have to find a different job. Getting a US-company to hire you is really difficult if you are from Iraq, I got my current employer through referals, and I am really grateful for that, but, I am not sure I can do it again.

However, given the prospective job availabilities in my country, and the high number of unemployed software developers, I'd say even finding a local job would be difficult.

So, I was wondering, would a pivot to Cybersecurity be worthwhile? Or should I instead focus on improving my frontend skills and marketing myself?

Selling yourself as a Cybersecurity dev from Iraq will probably be harder than selling yourself as a frontend engineer. So I would focus on improving frontend skills and marketing.

You didn't mention it as an option, but if you are tiring of frontend, I would consider pivoting to doing backend/fullstack/data engineering. Boost your database/analytics skills. Your front-end experience can help you have a nice niche in that backend space once you master backend work.

But this is just a guess on my part from an American developer/architect/hiring manager in both startups and large companies whose frontend skills plateaued 20 years ago at the expense of backend skills but who lightly follows frontend technologies.

I agree. It'll be hard to get hired in security due to your location.

I wouldn't pivot to security completely, it honestly seems like that field has been boiled down to moving data from automated security jobs into Jira and chasing down engineers to fix dependabot issues.

As a developer you should of course study security concepts and understand how to avoid creating exploits in what you are working on, but being a dev who understands a good amount about security is always going to be more useful to a company IMO

Ouch. What a cruel, but not completely unfounded, description of my life's work.

No disrespect, it's important to have people paying attention to these things or they would just never get fixed, but that's my take away from once being excited about going potentially going into this field to seeing what the day to day work was like

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