I think it’s safe to say I’m not a job hopper. Yet, after all these years, a pattern is starting to emerge. It seems my cycle is about 13 years – just like our Sun’s. :)
So, I’ve finally experienced the joy of getting fired.
It was not about my ‘performance’, but IBM decided to sell the product (QRadar) – and with it, pretty much the entire IT Security business and most of their clients too.
So, the rug was basically pulled from under me, the clients took their business elsewhere, and with them, the customer facing projects are gone.
Sure, at a multinational of this size, you could easily coast along for a few more years and/or hide behind whatever the latest buzzword is. But I felt that even if IBM couldn’t, someone else surely would know what to do with my 20+ years of IT Security experience.
To be honest, I never really wanted to work for a multi anyway, and I’ve already explained this in details before. Unfortunately(?), the years spent at IBM didn’t exactly disprove my theories. In fact, you realize pretty quickly from the inside that a multi has only one single goal: continuous revenue growth. And they don’t really try to hide this. For an enthusiastic, open-source-believing IT security professional, this is a heavy chain that the constant corporate marketing bullshit does nothing to loosen.
But of course, bills don’t pay themselves… And that was my primary motivation the last time I changed jobs. Thanks to the experience I brought with me, it actually worked out. It became obvious very early on that even though I came from a small, “no-name” company, the knowledge transfer was definitely not flowing in the direction they expected. :) Thanks to this, within a few years, I managed to climb the ladder to a point where my official job was to share my knowledge and experience with clients – as a consultant.
And I actually liked it. It was my ideal role.
But it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows.
It became clear pretty quickly that my critical thinking isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and it didn’t really align with the company’s money-centric view. What they really want are cheap, blinkered biorobots who can parrot the marketing bullshit without letting facts clutter their minds. People who enthusiastically – and blissfully unaware – serve as props in a Security Theater built out of buzzwords.
The true goal of products and services isn’t client satisfaction or success; it’s much more about ripping off the clients, where the keyword is “good enough”
For me, this was becoming harder and harder to stomach, so the gutting of the IT Security portfolio was just the final straw. Actually, I was happy to accept the fact that I no longer had to serve a money-hungry, bloated American corporation – with its greedy “owners” – that is merely trading on the once-proud IBM name.
I must highlight, however, that IBM Hungary – my actual employer – was completely fair, so a special thanks goes to them! :)
Unsurprisingly, they have absolutely no say in what IBM decides so they too are just pawns in a bigger game.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish!