Jam's Blog

I’m trying to make a small goal of writing about my ventures into creativity and/or tech at least once a week, so welcome to week two of the Artist’s Way: Tech Edition.

This week focused on really finding my identity, as well as support for my craft. It’s also about identifying your blockers/non-supportive sources so you can work past them. For tech, it really led me to be introspective about what hasn't worked, and what I really wanted.

As I noted last week, I am a survivalist when it comes to tech right now. I’m also a person who loves to get into new and good problems. New adventures that I think will help me grow. However, I’ve realized after talking with people who actually want to support my career, that what I’ve chosen for my career in the past few years (while beneficial in some ways) took me further and further away from my passions. And the further I got away from my passions, the less motivated I was to do any sort of work. I couldn’t do new things because I was doing so much gluework. I feel like this scenario is so incredibly common for Black Femmes in tech especially. We’re always being pushed to caretaking and then never given space to do much else. And to move beyond that, especially in startupland, it usually means doing work outside of work hours, or job hopping. However, I gained a pattern that wasn't conducive to following my passions, because I hoped for potential that tech couldn’t deliver.

The pattern was that I kept going into leadership because I felt it was the only route for opportunities to make true, big security changes. I always hoped that I'd get the opportunity to really do true security engineering. But a lot of times that ended up not being the case.

Especially for startupland, security can be a very isolating function. You’re always having to prove your cost center is valuable, but also not rocking the boat. You always take IT under your wing because you understand it's value, the security threats from it are real, and no one else wants to take it on, to be honest. Then add in a dash of compliance (which really isn't a dash). I stopped learning, and was just managing; even as an IC with no reports. And when I finally did move away from leadership back to Security Engineering as an IC, I felt as if I was still on this isolating island. And this is even while being the best collaborator and person who loves engaging with engineering. Because at the end of the day, Security Engineering is a hard fight to get priority for unless you're in a high risk industry like finance, government or healthcare.

And while all this was happening, I was seeing the engineering and product teams move forward with cool, impactful sh*t. And I was jealous. I knew security was important to the bottom line, and I couldn’t do anything else beyond what was absolutely required because everyone just saw me as a security expert, and not an engineer.

I am a technical person, remember? I used to do technical work and still can.

This leads me to now switching focus back to where it belongs. I’m going to put my engineer hat back on. I want to work on projects that drive me, and are impactful to people in the way I want them to be. Security, though I'm de-prioritizing focus, will always be a part of my life as an engineer. Engineering, even now with the advent of AI, requires security. So, as I develop things, it’ll still show up in my consulting, my security focused research, and open source work. I’ll also still keep my hours up for my CISSP because someday I hope to be back in Security Engineering proper (with the software engineering credits that everyone and their momma requires now). For now though, I really want to prioritize remembering what being creative in code is like, and the art of a good yak shave.