Infosec's Jerk Problem (2013)
I carve up this problem differently. To me, the field can be divided into two basic categories of people:<p>1. People who are into security to prosecute some immortal struggle between good and evil.<p>2. People who are into security because of the engineering challenge.<p>It's the people in group (1) that I tend to have a problem with. Often, for the "good guys" security professionals, engineering facts are just a means to the end of winning the war on the "bad guys". These are the people who tell you your Scala serverside application is insecure because of some recently-released Java applet bug; they're the people who fought against DNS query randomization for a decade because we need to finally release DNSSEC; they're the ones shipping grievously broken cryptography to try to "stop the NSA".<p>There are jerks in both categories, and competition is a dimension orthogonal to this one, but I find I can handle jerkiness and competition between when I know it's from someone who truly cares about understanding what they're talking about.