CyberWire Daily - Anna Belak: Acquiring skills to make you into a unicorn. [Thought Leadership] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: August 7, 2022

Anna Belak, Director of Thought Leadership at Sysdig, shares her story from physics to cyber. Anna explains how she went into college with the thinking of getting a physics degree and then for her PhD decided to switch to material science and engineering. Both were not something she enjoyed and ultimately decided to go into cyber. She shares some advice on how you should never limit yourself to your degree, as well as always learning new skills and honing in on skills you already have. She say's by doing these things it will make you into a unicorn, meaning if you are good at one thing and teach yourself to be good at something else, you will become that much more valuable. Anna hopes she makes an impact with the people she works with, she hopes they will want to work with her even long after she leaves a company. We thank Anna for sharing her story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. I was convinced when I was a kid that I wanted to be a mathematician. And now that I'm an adult, I think you should be highly suspicious of kids that tell you they want to be mathematicians or brain surgeons or software engineers because kids don't want to do that. Kids want to be dinosaurs and firefighters and candy store owners. And so the ones that say they want to be mathematicians are coached. I was coached by my nerdy parents and I was convinced I wanted to be

a mathematician. So I kind of followed it through because it wasn't bad, right? You know, I enjoyed the classes. I enjoyed activities that involved math and science and discovering sort of the world in this way. But the moment when I really had to think about it was when I actually was choosing a major for college. And I really wanted to study psychology as it turned out, but basically I decided to study physics instead. And the logic there was that, well, by this point I realized that math is a little too abstract for me and I would like something a little more tangible and practical. And so physics was the choice because I figured that psychology was not going to be a good career trajectory in terms of being employable. So I was like, well, let's just do the physics thing.

So physics is hard, as it turns out. And actually, I knew this going in. And I told myself the story that even if I hated physics and it wasn't the right choice, that if I could do physics, then I could do anything. So I actually discovered probably by junior year that I didn't really like physics all that much. Not because it's not beautiful and amazing and fantastic, but because I didn't really see myself enjoying that long-term as a career or honestly the classes were hard and painful.

So I suffered through and I graduated and I finished my bachelor's degree and I decided I would go to graduate school. And as I was deciding that, it occurred to me that actually physics was still a little abstract for me. So I majored in material science and engineering for my graduate degree, thinking that I would keep creeping toward greater and greater applied sciences and pragmatism, and maybe I would find my center eventually. After six years of PhDing, I realized that even in a really interesting field like solar energy,

there's a lot of just doing the same thing every day. You perform the same experiment every day in the lab, and it's a little bit soul-crushing, actually. If you're not deeply passionate about the process, it mostly just hurts after a while. So I just decided I wasn't really cut out to be a professor or an academic of any kind and that I would have to do something else. And I don't know if it's fortunate or unfortunate that it took me until I was 28 to figure that out, but that's how long it took.

but that's how long it took. I would have probably been a lot more miserable if I didn't have the type of personality that enjoys challenges. So I kind of feel like I made it through all of that. Fairly difficult, I would say, schooling. Not because I loved physics or I needed to be a mathematician or any of that, but because I just enjoyed being challenged and it almost didn't matter on what front.

For a brief period, I worked for a company that was doing actually solar-related things, but more on the consulting and finance side, which was kind of interesting. That didn't last, so I decided to move on. And what happened was fairly unlikely in that I got a callback from Gartner, which is a large analyst firm that does all kinds of information technology and now actually broader research and advisory. And I actually didn't know what they were. I'd heard about them from somebody in my network

and they were like, just apply. They hire smart people. So I did. And they interviewed me, which is wild because normally they interview people that are very, very senior and have had a long and illustrious IT career. And I was not that.

I was not that. I was ultimately there for six years, which was fantastic. It's an incredibly cool job. In some sense, it's fairly similar to academia in that your mission is to help people. You're supposed to educate people on what the best way to do certain things is. And you'll learn that by talking to the best in the industry. You talk to startup companies, to established companies, you talk to end users who are accomplishing all kinds of fantastic technical things or going through fantastic technical struggles and you aggregate all that information

into what Gartner and many others call thought leadership, which is basically a view of how the world should be or what the best way to do things ought to be. The only downside to Gartner is that people like me who have little patience tend to get bored quickly. I worked for two separate teams. The first team I worked on was focused on infrastructure agility. So DevOps, DevSecOps, containers, Kubernetes. And the second team I worked on was focused on security.

containers, Kubernetes. And the second team I worked on was focused on security. But after three years of each, I just felt this itch to actually get into what I call the real world. Because as awesome as Gartner is for the breadth of experience that you get to see, you are still very much removed, you're abstracted from the reality of it all.

You're not in it, you're just kind of watching it from a distance, and I wanted to be in it. So basically took the chance and I went to a company that does both security and containers and that's how I ended up at Sysdig. I have a pretty unusual role, actually. I spend a lot of time with marketing and products. My primary mission is actually to create and deliver content. So I write blogs, I create white papers, I speak at conferences or on podcasts. I work for a vendor, obviously,

but my job isn't to market the vendor. It's to try to explain what's going on in the industry, how it's evolving, what are people struggling with, and what are the strategies they can employ to succeed at overcoming those challenges and hopefully how ultimately our product and company can help them. It's particularly interesting because the market is very rapidly evolving. This is a cloud security market specifically.

And so the things that were needed yesterday or things that were considered normal yesterday may be completely different next week. So that's the most exciting part. Like my job is just to try to keep up and to help both my company create a great product and also to help the potential users of our product or just folks who are stumbling upon our blogs to understand what's going on and do their best. Don't limit yourself and your career opportunities

by focusing too much on things like whatever degree you got or whatever your current title is or even what industry you're in. So I was a physicist essentially that was going to be a professor and I just decided one day that I didn't feel like it anymore and now I'm a cybersecurity expert. So if you got a degree in something

that maybe is not as easy to employ, or maybe you just decided you don't like it anymore, don't worry about that. Think about what skills you actually have and what skills you might need to succeed in some other role that isn't the one you're in right now. And the second piece is related, but it's about figuring out which skills you actually could acquire or might be missing or could improve that would make you into, I'm going to say a unicorn, even though it's a little cliche. You could be a really great engineer and you can make a lot of money and you can be super successful. But if you're a great engineer and a great communicator, that is invaluable. Those people are super rare. And if you can teach yourself as a great engineer to be a great

communicator, you become that much more valuable to literally anybody, actually, to the industry. I mean, ultimately, I think any role you have along the way is almost more important who you meet and how you make an impression on those people than what you actually did there. And so what happens is once you have met a bunch of people that you enjoy working with, you never really want to let them go. So I hope maybe that the most impactful thing about me in any company is that people want to work with me even after I've left. Thank you.