@Background Pony #48C1

Do what you need to survive. I'd just take the advice of the garbage man from that comic strip. As for escaping the "economy" well… Candy up there found out one way to do it. Might end badly outside of a fantasy adventure comic. "The economy" is a dangerous illusion though, trying to make you think they're what's inevitable. Death and taxes, right? What's actually inevitable is society: cooperation and conflict. Interaction is inevitable. Choosing between working for a salary for a big company and digging ditches is just one very narrow path through that. A false dilemma I'd say. What your best bet is, regardless of your profession, is making some friends and allying together. Forming a tribe.

@skybrook
There is that, but as a practical matter, for most of us, the rent money has to come from somewhere. A job where you work sitting down at a desk in a climate-controlled building has a lot to recommend it over digging ditches for a living. Everybody participates in the economy. Everyone is complicit. You can't escape, short of living in a cave—and I don't think there are enough caves for everybody. This means you have to make some choices and make some plans. It is entirely appropriate to think of ways to make things better, but in the meantime you have to eat.

@Background Pony #48C1

I'd really rather not help the PHBs continue to make things worse until they do figure out a way to outsource my jobs. You can't defeat an abuser by assuming that you're too tough or smart to be abused. Any deals with such organizations are a devil's bargain at best.

@skybrook
The small bright spot in all of this, if you're a bright young person in a First World country, is that at least for the moment, the insurance companies are making it prohibitive for the PHBs to hire H1Bs for infosec, or outsource those jobs to the Third World. For the moment. The TV news and the Internet social media influencers all agree that the field is growing and there exists enormous need for people with these skills, though people who get the certs and apply for the jobs don't all agree.

Nonetheless, if you have a basic grasp of certain very basic ideas—a computer is a very sophisticated, very simple-minded machine that carries out instructions sequentially, that information is stored in the form of ones and zeroes, and so on—there are free courses you can take online, in places like Youtube. If you already have a certain degree of technical knowledge, you will be profoundly disappointed at the lack of depth in the courses to get infosec certifications—I'm talking about Security+, CEH, CASP, things like that. It just costs a few hundred dollars to test for most of these certs, which may make them a pretty good investment, compared to what it costs to go to college whether you graduate or not. Whether they make you more employable is a different question—it's not an easy field to break into from the outside, certs or no. But if you enjoy learning how things work, it might even be interesting.

@Background Pony #48C1

Right, so intentional, in order to try and rig the game. (i.e. rent and office space are so cheap!) They can pretend ignorance, but those guys are more at fault for all those security breaches than even the Russian Mafia who's just taking their cut, and wouldn't be able to get all those numbers if PHBs hadn't made those decisions.

We should have been using public keys not credit card numbers, back in the 1980's. The fact we aren't today is also the fault of corporate managers knowingly forcing us to keep using the broken system just so they can keep selling us out for pennies.

@skybrook
Infosec would not be needed if the PHBs were able to resist outsourcing to Third World countries. It was so, so profitable, right up until all the customers' credit card numbers got sold to the Triads or the Russian Mafia by someone being paid a tenth of what they'd have had to pay an American. Infosec exists so that management can say "But we hired a cybersecurity team, it must be all THEIR fault" whenever the company gets sued.

When the self-driving vehicles—which will be so profitable, and so cheap, now that they don't have to pay a human to drive them, and so convenient for governments that don't really like the whole "freedom of movement" idea—start getting hacked by people with violent intent and the body counts start to rise, management is going to point the finger at the people who've been telling them that putting a self-driving vehicle on the Internet of Things was a bad idea the whole time.

IT departments, like manufacturing, are regarded as an expense, and so they are given the minimum possible budget, the minimum possible staffing, and 100% of the blame for absolutely everything that happens, from power outages to that data center that the C-suite insisted on building in an unstable Third World city ("Rent and office space are so cheap there! I'm sure nothing will happen, don't be so negative! This is money we're talking about here!") getting got burned down during a riot. At the next board meeting this will be used to justify further "offshoring" and "rightsizing." Let's give even more passwords, encryption keys, and sensitive company information to people who know they're being exploited. What could possibly go wrong?

@Background Pony #48C1

The infosec world is pretty self-important and proud tbh. A lot of those "inside jobs" are infosec workers making retarded mistakes, or moronic "leaders" avoiding retribution by setting up someone else to take the fall. And some of it's intended by their employers, doing shady business to try and rig the game.

Anyway I think it's implied that Candy has more skills, beyond just what she knows of Pony Google's internal architecture.

In the infosec world they say that 90%+ of "sophisticated hacker attacks" are inside jobs, in the sense that they are carried out either by or with the cooperation of disgruntled inside actors. Insiders do sell thumbdrives full of passwords and encryption keys all the time. I don't know what the going rate for that kind of thing is, though. I have serious doubts that you could "start over" on it.

Aha, yes. That is why I make all those bogus commits, too. Because I am an elite hacker and it is all part of the plan. I was only pretending to be retarded!