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&#x27;s the people in group (1) that I tend to have a problem with. Often, for the &quot;good guys&quot; security professionals, engineering facts are just a means to the end of winning the war on the &quot;bad guys&quot;. These are the people who tell you your Scala serverside application is insecure because of some recently-released Java applet bug; they&#x27;re the people who fought against DNS query randomization for a decade because we need to finally release DNSSEC; they&#x27;re the ones shipping grievously broken cryptography to try to &quot;stop the NSA&quot;.<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&#x27;s from someone who truly cares about understanding what they&#x27;re talking about.