Shared thoughts after 6 years in Pentesting
1. You definitely do not need to make security part of your "lifestyle", much less spend 80 hours a week working at it. The irony is that the author is a netpen person, which is sort of infamously the least demanding specialty in offensive security. If people writing browser drive-by exploits can stay on top of their game with a 40 hour work-week, I think the netpen people can too.<p>2. Don't get certificates. If you meet a prospective employer who seems intensely interested in them, that's a red flag about that job.<p>3. The idea that you should aspire to being able to do your whole job from a Linux terminal is pretty silly. Use what works for you.<p>Maybe it takes more than 6 years in offensive security to realize this, but the #1 bit of advice for this field is: learn to enjoy coding. The worst possible place to end up in security is as a captive to available tooling.