Screaming in the Cloud - Burnout and Breaking the Internet with Serena DiPenti

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Corey Quinn talks with Serena DiPenti, aka “SheNetworks,” about her career from Cisco to Black Hills Information Security and her challenges in content creation. Serena reflects on starting at Cisco, where her role as a tech engineer required deep expertise and navigating rigid, high-pressure situations that led to burnout and limited growth opportunities. Now at Black Hills, she enjoys the hands-on work in security analysis and network-based penetration testing. Serena finds content creation more demanding than her cybersecurity work, often facing audience skepticism and burnout. However, her podcast Breaking the Internet provides a rewarding, conversational outlet for sharing insights.Show Highlights(00:00) Introduction(00:37) Dragonfly sponsor read(1:20) Catching up with Serena since she was last on the show(2:34) Serena’s experience at CISCO(8:00) How Serena got stuck in her TAC role(11:06) Serena’s pivot to her new role at Black Hills Information Security(14:10) When Serena finds time to sleep during her busy schedule(16:43) Corey’s short-lived attempt at YouTube(20:28) The importance of conversational content(21:43) Serena’s plans for naming and branding(25:49) Where Serena sees herself aiming next(31:18) How to follow Serena’s workAbout SerenaSerena DiPenti is an offensive security professional who shares her experiences and expertise through her Shenetworks educational content on platforms like TikTok, Twitter (X), YouTube, and Twitch. Her focus includes topics related to penetration testing, ethical hacking, and other areas of cybersecurity. She's passionate about helping others break into the cybersecurity field, offering tips, guidance, and career advice.Serena’s work includes creating accessible and engaging content that demystifies complex cybersecurity concepts, making the industry more inclusive and approachable for beginners and professionals alike.LinksYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@shenetworks TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@shenetworks?lang=en Twitter: https://x.com/shenetworksBuy our charity shirt to help support 826 National!https://store.lastweekinaws.com/SponsorDragonfly: dragonflydb.io

Sometimes I think I'm a little bit of a perfectionist and I hold myself back in that sense where I want to make sure everything's great and perfect and I have this one kind of narrow idea of how content creation should be, but like, actually it's not. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's been a few years since we got to talk with Serena Depenzi, better known on the internet as SheNetworks. Serena, how are you? I'm good. How are you?

I'm surviving. And sometimes that's really the best that we can hope for. But the battle continues. It's an interesting time for the Redis ecosystem with licensing changes, the Valkey fork, and AWS dropping prices for customers who are willing to migrate to ElastiCache for Valkey. Dragonfly is another really interesting player in this space, as they've built the Redis-compatible data store that delivers significantly better performance at a much lower cost. If you're running ElastiCache or Redis cloud workloads in AWS, Dragonfly guarantees a minimum 25% reduction in your bill. Listeners of Screaming in the Cloud can snag

a $200 credit to try it by heading to dragonflydb.io and use the code SCREAMING after signing up to take advantage of that $200 credit offer. Seriously, what are you waiting for? And my thanks to Dragonfly for sponsoring this episode. When last we spoke, you worked at Cisco. It's not clear what you were doing at Cisco at the time, because I don't know what the hell anyone at that company is doing. It sort of seems to be frozen in amber like a beautiful mosquito at the height of its glory 20 some odd years ago. And nothing really seemed to evolve since then. That is probably a tremendously unfair characterization, but I have trauma around Cisco. Understandable. I feel like I walked away from that job with a little trauma myself. I wouldn't necessarily say that's a completely unfair characteristic. There's a whole soapbox we can go on about that.

But yeah, last time I was there, last time I was here, I was working at Cisco. I'm pretty sure I was a customer success engineer, customer success specialist. I was the technical lead for data center products. Basically what my team did was help customers. It's a post-sale job. So if they're having issues kind of integrating their products into their existing environment, we kind of work with them to help get over like those obstacles. And then before that, I was a data center server. So UCS, Unified Communication, or Unified Compute, tech engineer. So that's what I was. If I could remember now, it's been a while. It seems like Cisco is as guilty as any other big company about this, where the jobs become so specific and niched down in various parts of the

org that the only way to identify it is with a string of words to the point where people's business cards almost have to unfold to fit all of the words in their job title onto the card. That is the thing with working at Cisco or being kind of a network engineer at Cisco is a lot of the jobs,

you have to know so much depth where when you're working in a traditional network engineering role, you probably are working with a lot of different products. You don't have the depth, but those engineers are the ones that call the ones at Cisco when they need help with a very specific product. And you just learn every single thing you could possibly imagine about that product. And you really do get siloed pretty easily. But there is a bit of a skill to that. I have that talent with some areas of AWS where I've trod the ground so well that someone starts describing a

weird problem they're having and mid-sentence, I can finish the sentence for them and then tell them in the same breath how to fix it. It's more like, are you a wizard? No, I'm purely someone that's been doing this for too long and treading the same ground. So one of my concerns when I started working at Cisco, I was fresh out of college. I got hired through their new graduate program. And I had not even heard of UCS or unified computing systems before I started working at Cisco. And then three months later, I was a tech engineer on that team. And one of my biggest concerns was, how am I going to help these professional network engineers

figure out the problem that they're having? I have no experience. And sometimes I would be on calls with customers and I would get a notification that they viewed my LinkedIn profile. And I'm like, oh, it's over. They know I'm a fraud. I don't mean to be unkind, but with AWS, I have the same challenge where account managers,

basically the salespeople that manage accounts, that accounts get allocated to them based on spend. My accounts personally are all tiny. So whenever I get a new account manager, which seems like it happens every 20 minutes, when I looked them up on LinkedIn and sure enough, three to four months ago, they were selling gym memberships.

And okay, this is sort of their first enterprise sales job. And I do my best to be unfailingly kind because I am a difficult customer at the best of times. And I feel like someone is being pranked over there. Like, I know what account we're going to give them. This will fix their little red wagon. It's almost a form of corporate hazing. Oh, yeah. I mean, when I started, everyone kind of warns you. It's like drinking water from a hose. The next year of your life is going to be rough. It's going to be very, very rough. You have to get really, really good quickly. You have to learn how to manage customers very quickly and not just customers, but account teams are a big one, especially working in tech.

You would get cases where maybe this customer was a big customer and they spent a bunch of money. And now the account manager's like, replace, replace, replace. Any problem that the customer's having at all, they don't want to troubleshoot, just send them a new part. And a lot of times that's not the issue at all. You can replace the part forever, but if it's a faulty configuration that you keep applying to the thing, packets will not flow any more smoothly. Oh, yeah. There was one case I distinctly remember where the server that they had was a million-dollar server. And this was a server that did a ton of just data analysis, computing, all that. It was a million-dollar server, and they were having an issue with it. And the account team just kept hounding me like,

hey, replace it, replace it, replace it. And the device, the server was in maintenance mode. So when that particular server was in maintenance mode, half of the actual DIMMs or your RAM in there is actually functional. It's not fully functional in maintenance mode. I literally just had to turn it off of maintenance mode. And the account team wanted me to replace a million dollar server. It's always weird to me because those roles tend to be relatively early career, as you describe.

And that's the type of corporate job where you almost have to raise your hand to ask permission to use the bathroom. And you're generally paid terribly. But you also are able to push a button and ship a million dollar computer across the country or across the world with effectively no oversight. It always felt weird to me that that strange juxtaposition, like my signing authority would crap out at 50 bucks in some jobs. But I had root in production. These two things are not necessarily alike, but one of them feels really out of order with the other one. Yeah, I would be replacing sometimes parts that were more than my entire salary in a day or more than my student loans that I had that I was

killing myself to try and pay off. And I would just be like, oh, press the button and it just shows up at their door, obviously. And so that was very interesting. I mean, I will say as far as a culture goes, it wasn't. Here's the thing, good tech engineers, they can get away with murder because they're so hard to find. They're hard to retain because it's a position you get burnt out really quickly and they'll just eat you up and spit you out, right? And so if you are a good tech engineer and you don't get complaints and you're solving your cases and not really making any trouble, you can really, you can kind of do whatever you want. It really is dependent on team. I would say I only have experience working on one team and cultures in those teams can vary very widely. But that was kind of my experience.

In a lot of companies, when you excel in a support function, very often you get poached out of that support function to go do something else within the org. You're amazing at getting this stuff up and running. Do you want to come be a sales engineer or do you want to come work on the engineering team to build the thing? Does Cisco have a culture of doing that or do you wind up, I'm excelling at this and this is where I'm going to stay? So I don't know if you've ever publicly talked about this, so I'll kind of keep it somewhat generic. But when I was a tech engineer, I had applied for this customer success role. One, because I wanted to get out of tech. Mainly, money was a big motivator there because

I really was not making that much. And then two, I was working so many severity outage cases like every single day. And you'd be there until 7 p.m. before you could hand the case off to Australia. I mean, we're talking about hospital outages, 911 outages, and they can get really stressful. And executives get involved. I'll be on a call with 50 different people, a CEO of, you know, like companies as big as like NBC or something. It can get really hairy and dicey really quick. But I applied, I got hired essentially.

And so a part of the internal process there is the manager from the hiring team and the manager from your team discuss when the transition will happen basically, because there has to be some overlap, right? And I didn't know that someone else on my team also got hired in that position. They had more than one. And so when I had told my boss, he was very upset because we were already short-staffed. And at this point, they were not giving us any more rec, so they

weren't hiring. They were just whittling down more and more. And so TAC engineers felt like they had even more on their plate. Not a great, you know, combination of situations there. And then I would say like a week later, I got me and the other person on the team that got hired for this position, got an email saying that like, oh, we decided to go in a different direction. Always fun when that happens. And this doesn't comport with my experience with TAC. Back when I was running around data centers

and setting up weird network things, TAC support was legendary, where they had a follow the sun handoff where someone's shift was ending, where they bring someone else on to do a warm handover. And the people you were talking to could have done a walk-on role at any of these companies as the network architect slash most

senior network engineer there without breaking a sweat. It was amazing to behold. Every other company's support looked like relative ass. So the thing was, is they wanted us on that new team. The reason that they were going a different way is because my manager at the time, I assume, I assume, didn't want us to leave the team. And it wasn't anything about us not being a good fit for the position. It was this was going to cause a problem with the team and they were going to be losing two really good engineers on an already understaffed team. But they weren't very transparent with that. And that's how I quit Cisco the first time. After that happened, I applied for jobs that same night. Two weeks

later, I had a job and I was like, peace out. Good for you. And I want to be clear because we've spent a fair bit of time talking about it already. You don't work at Cisco. It would be interesting if you did. And this is how you like, don't worry. It's not like they ever listen to anything I say. That sounds like a way to get surprise fired the next day. For a little while now, you've been a security analyst at Black Hills Information Security. That is quite the pivot. It is a pivot. Yeah. It's been fun, though. I really do like working on tests. I mean, there's pros and cons. There's some kind of unexpected anomalies or things, you know, just the learning curve. I do a lot of network-based pen tests. So I was really good at all of the networking aspects of testing,

which was great because it can be very network heavy. I recently did a test that was just network access bypass on-site for a customer. And so that was fun because that was the first time I ever really went on-site somewhere and was, you know, plugging my laptop into things. And that went really well. So, yeah. It's a very fun type of role to my understanding, at least the way that it's described. But then I talk to people at some length who do the physical pen tests and all the rest. And it turns out like the overwhelming majority of their work by volume is it seems spent writing reports. A hundred percent. Yeah, I would say the vast majority of what I'm doing is report writing. There are elements of that in the consulting space as well. There's no way away from it.

It's like, honestly, the biggest lie I would always tell myself, I didn't realize I was lying at the time, was, you know, back in school, it was, man, I can't wait to enter the real world and stop having to write book reports all the time. Yeah, that's not how the world worked out as it turned out. Yeah, it's probably 20 times worse than college. So if you don't like writing reports, this probably is not the career for you. I hate to say it. You know, I will say that different pen testing companies have different standards on reporting. So for people who are listening, if you are interested in kind of finding out these standards when you're

scouting these companies, you can ask them for a sample report, which is just like a bunch of fake information. But it gives you an idea of the type of information, the style and methodology that you will receive in a report. You know, I've seen reports from other pen testing companies that customers had shown me. And sometimes it's literally just like an Excel sheet. And they're like, this is the finding that I found. We ran a Nessus scan and slapped their logo at the top of the printout. What do you want from us? Not quite the same thing. Yeah. And some, I know, you know, at some pen testing companies too, you have testers working multiple tests at once. You know, luckily at Black Hills, we don't do that. We have one customer, one test, we're scheduled off with that. I can,

you know, put all of my time into this one customer. I'm not spreading it across three, four different people, which I appreciate. I think that's some good advice. If you are looking for a pen testing job, find out that information of how many pen tests at once will you actually be on? Because that is important. Yeah, that's one of those things that really matters in relatively short order. So you've also been for quite a while now, an extremely prolific content creator. So it seems like writing reports isn't enough. You want to create additional content beyond that. When do you sleep? I would say I am probably like a D grade content creator, mainly because I'm just not very consistent. I like putting stuff out there, right? But, you know, some people go into content creation with the idea that this is something that they want to do full time. They want to make full-time career out of YouTube or, you know, TikTok or whatever

that is. I can honestly say, in my opinion, content creation is harder than my actual jobs, either as an engineer or as a pen tester. Absolutely. One of the things that I think dooms a lot of prospective content creators is that requirement of I'm going to do this as my primary job. Because as soon as you do that, suddenly that's an awful lot of pressure and you're under tight deadlines. And it doesn't matter if you don't have something to say this week, you've got to ship it out because people are expecting you to ship that out.

And it really feels like it forces almost a sense of desperation. And I think that comes through in a lot of content when people are under the gun. Yeah. This past couple of weeks, I've been watching a lot of other tech YouTubers, mainly trying to see different styles of how people put together their content. Because sometimes I think I'm a little bit of a perfectionist and I hold myself back in that sense where I want to make sure everything's great and perfect. And I have this one kind of narrow idea of how content creation should be. But like, actually, it's not. It's not that at all. There's so many different content creators with their own styles and their own way of explaining and doing things. And so I think it's kind of important to find your way. But also,

like you said, yeah, if you don't have anything to say, it is a lot of pressure and you can kind of like the creative burnout is so real. It is so real. I yesterday tweeted and I asked other YouTubers how much time aside from the actual video are you putting into each video, right? So you might see a finished product that's 11, 15, 20 minutes long. And most of these people are saying 20 times the actual length of the video is how much time and effort they're putting into just that one video.

So 11 minute video might cost you 20, 40 hours of prep and like editing, filming, all that. When I was doing the YouTube thing, which I never quite got the hang of, that was the first thing I cut when I found myself stretched too far, just because it was about as much work as every other piece of content I put out, put together. Like here on a podcast, like sure, I can turn the camera on and we can put the video up on YouTube like we tend to do. But that's not the same thing as I'm now going to

monologue to the camera with a highly produced thing. And I offloaded everything that I could. I don't know how to edit video. I don't have the bandwidth to learn. So I just throw that to people who are great at it. But even like the rehearsals, the scripts, the costumes, because of course you need costumes if you're doing this stuff correctly. And also with all of that work that gets onto it, I suddenly found that I had writer's block for the first time where I don't quite know where to go or what to say next because it feels like most of the things I wanted to say were three to five minutes and the algorithm demands longer content than that. I just, I gave up on it. It wasn't bringing me joy.

And a lot of content creators, especially now that I've been doing it for probably four or five years-ish, I do see a lot of content creators come up really fast, which is great because they have that early momentum and excitement. And the second that wears off, you just kind of see them trail off. And I did that personally. I mean, I still do try and produce content in various forms. I don't really hold myself back to one format per se, but I see a lot of people have all these ambitions in the beginning. And then once you get into it and you realize, wow, I'm spending a lot of time and a lot of work and you're not getting paid the vast majority of time. You're not making money until you have a decent size following. The worst part

of it is when you're just starting out the getting paid path, where you're effectively busting your hump and putting all of that work in, because it's now a job. You are making money, and you have made commitments to folks, and you're getting $500 in return for those tens of hours of work. It is so far below minimum wage when you amortize it out that it is the worst situation to be in. I'd rather be doing it for free for the love of it. And that's why I'm very particular about what kind of sponsors I take on. And I do consider how many hours in this video each video is going to take. Because at the end of the day, I'm a salary employee. I make decent money working in cybersecurity. So a $500 incentive

for a video is not exciting for me, particularly based on the amount of work that I would have to put in to that video, right? I'm like, I don't want to work for minimum wage now, especially when it's cutting into just like your personal time, right? Outside of your nine to five. And that's a lot of content creators. They go to work during the day and then they get off and they spend their weekends doing this stuff. And yeah, and there's very little reward most of the time. And the idea of, well, I'm building a brand.

Well, okay, sure. But that can be fickle. And there's no guarantee there's a payoff there down the road. And as long as you keep compromising and having to put different types of content out there to assuage advertisers, you get away from the core of what you love doing. It feels like you don't recognize where you end up from where you started. It is, it is tough.

That's why I think I'm a little bit more infrequent with putting out at least YouTube videos and video content. I did start a podcast with my friend Allie, who's ending with Allie on Twitch and Twitter or X. No, it's Twitter. Twitter. Yeah. And so, you know, that is kind of nice.

I do like that format a lot more. There's a lot of like two-way conversation, obviously, like we're having here and different opinions. And so I've really enjoyed that format a lot. And I'm a big podcast listener myself. We're getting very meta here. But yeah, I'm a big podcast listener myself. So I really do like the format and the platform. to sit here and monologue into a microphone because the microphone gives nothing back whatsoever.

Here, if I'm too zany, you'll laugh or ask me what the hell is wrong with me. And great. That is feedback that I can read. Oh, maybe I should tone it down in some ways, put the costumes and props away and we're good. There's a there's a sense of it progressing somewhere. And it's not just me having to fill the dead air to hear myself talk. Yeah, we are definitely more casual talking on our podcast. Yes, thank you.

We're a guest on it. So thank you for coming on. It was a great conversation. But then, you know, I listened to like also Jack Reciter's podcast, Darknet Diaries. And he just he has so much production into that podcast. It's great. I love it. But then I also listen to other podcasts that have zero production. And it's just like, you know, throwing stuff out there. And I like that there's

kind of that diversity to choose from depending on like, hey, what am I, you know, in the mood for? I'm like cleaning my house or, you know, going on a walk to see the outdoors every once in a while and really just kind of, you know, pick what I want to listen to. I want to talk about naming and branding for a second. You are known on the internet as She Networks, but now you're in the security space more so than you are the networking space. Do you think there's going to come a day where it no longer aligns with what you're focusing on? No, I think it'll always align. I mean, networking is my first passion, especially in security. I do so much networking work, networking content as well. So I do webcasts for Black Hills Information Security where I work. They have a YouTube page

where they're constantly putting out this kind of content. And I've done webcasts on gathering credentials through network-based attacks where you're basically exploiting different networking protocols, DNS, deep diving into DNS and how you can use it from an offensive attacker standpoint or, you know, from a blue team. What are the threats there? And I'm trying to remember which some of the other ones that I have done, but everything that I really do still is very networking focused. And it's kind of nice because coming up as a network engineer, you are learning all these protocols. And now I feel like I'm learning them just in a different

way. Like I'm seeing them all in a new light and going back to like my days as a network engineer, I'm being like, oh, well, that's scary. Because, you know, I didn't, I wasn't as familiar with all the ways that networking protocols can be exploited. And now that I am and I'm like, oh, my goodness, like it's very eye opening. When I first got into networking because I wanted to understand how the Internet worked. And then once I learned a bit about it, I entered a different phase that I'm still in, which is how the hell did any of this ever work in the first place? Yeah, it's exciting. I love that. I have obviously a love hate relationship with the internet because there's so much good and there's so much bad. But, you know, especially the way that it's evolved over the last few decades. And yeah, I probably will always stay really close to networking and just really focus on like the security aspects of networking. So I think I'll always be she networks tried and true, you know? Critical error when I launched my last week in AWS brand by putting the term last week into it,

which means that I am on the hook every week to go ahead and crank something out, even when I'm not in any way, shape or form prepared to do it, or it's been a slow news week. There's an implicit expectation there. I'm sure someday if AWS fades in its supremacy that it's in now and the world pivots to something else, that'll also leave me feeling old and dated, but that so far hasn't happened yet. There's something to be said about, on some level, having a brand that sort of ties you into a space, even when your interests are dragging you in other places. I don't quite know how to fix that because people crave specificity. That is true, especially when you start building an audience on one topic and then pivoting can be very, very difficult. Luckily, I feel like I haven't really run into that issue yet,

but I mean, there's still plenty of time. Exactly. That's the fun part is you never quite know what tomorrow's going to hold. Where do you see yourself aiming at next? And there are three to five years. I know it sounds like a job interview question, but usually the reason folks ask it is, okay, do you have ambition? Where do you see things tracking? And in the interview context, it's always a, there's a formulaic way to respond. It's great. You do the thing, but I'm legitimately serious here. Where do you see your arc taking you? I would really like to do more podcasting content and really kind of grow that as a platform.

I think that it's a great way to give information to people and for people to kind of integrate that information into their everyday life and tasks. Right. But as far as I don't know, I just, I still have so much to learn in security that I can just see myself here for the next five years, just learning as much as I can, you know, and hopefully being able to make that information accessible to other people who want to go in a similar route that I did. And I know it sounds terrible, but I feel like I'm not that ambitious. Just like I'm happy with what I'm doing.

Like I said, the podcast. But other than that, I just want to learn and continue to do what I'm doing and just get better at it. There's a desperate need for this. Security is one of those things that people care about right after they really should have cared about security. And in cloud, there's a sense that networking isn't really something you have to spend a lot of time focusing on because your provider handles it for you. But first, that only works until suddenly it very much doesn't. And also, I became a much better systems person when I understood how the network worked. I got much better at troubleshooting, understanding why I was seeing certain behaviors. It made me a much more well-rounded engineer.

And I think that there's not a lot of attention given to it these days in the boot camps and the DevOps in five minutes guides that people wind up publishing out constantly. I wish that there was more of an emphasis on it because it all comes down to what's on the wire. I really think the crux of that problem is people who are also giving out these boot camps and creating these things don't know about networking themselves. Maybe they had a networking class if they were a CS major and it was like, oh, I hated that class. But to me, I think networking really is the golden ticket. It's just so fundamental. And of course, I'm sure, you know,

with software, software engineer is going to say, you know, software and coding is more fundamental or whatever, but there's just so many places you can go and things you can do. And everything just starts making a lot more sense when you have the foundational networking concepts. Because I did get the AWS. It wasn't like the AWS Associate Certification. I did take that and pass. And really, it was so easy for me just because I already understood all

these concepts. I just needed to associate AWS's terminology with these existing concepts. And once I was like, oh, okay, so AWS calls, you know, this thing a load balancer and you have Route 53 for, you know, DNS. Or you can hold it wrong and use it as a database, which I get yelled at by the team for all the time. But yeah, everything's a database if you hold it wrong. This is one of the things I've always appreciated about your content is there's a certain category of content creator where they don't actually have the in-depth knowledge around the thing that they're speaking of. And I want to be clear, I am not talking about the learn in public types. Great. Good for that. They are, they are being transparent, but the people passing themselves off as experts about

a thing that they only learned existed a week ago really irks me it's a because you there's nuance and there's in there's in-depth things and sharp edges you want to guide people around and if you just went through the hello world tutorial and now you're talking as if you've been working with it for years you're gonna lead people to a bad place you've never even slightly moved in that direction. Yeah, I definitely see that. I see that in content creation. I see it sometimes people just giving bad advice on YouTube or TikTok. And then I see it in my comment section. So there is one video, I've talked about this before. There's one video that I did. It was like, can hackers track your

IP address? You know, find your location from your IP, find your house. And the amount of negative comments that I received on that was typically, I would say, like maybe high school gamer age demographic of people being like, that's not true. I hope that's the demographic because the depressing part is that these are mid-career professionals behaving that way. I want to say, I mean, I just, I want to say that's not the case. Hopefully not. I mean, how I usually respond to this, because one, I think people think I'm a little bit younger than I am and I don't have the experience or I am one of those content creators that read something is like, okay, I'm going to throw this out there. And I'm so conscious about, I don't want to put out wrong information. So I double check things that I know 100%.

I'm like, oh, just let me double check, make sure, because I don't want to put inaccurate information out there, right? But with those comments, especially with the IP address, and I just commented, I'm like, here's the RFC for the internet protocol. Please point out the section

where it talks about location tracking. And they're so confused by this because they've never been presented with an RFC in their life. They have no clue that RFCs exist and that internet protocols are open standards that you can find everything about in these documents, right? And so I've had people be like, I don't know what that is. Like, I'm confused. I don't know. Or one person was like, I can't find it. And I'm like, I know. That's kind of the entire point of the conversation. Yeah. Right. And so I do feel like I do get a lot of flack sometimes just from people who like assume that I'm one of those content creators. And so that kind of irks me when I see people doing that, because it's like, dang, I'm fighting

these stereotypes, right? And this person is basically doing what everyone, a lot of these other people are accusing me of doing, and they're successfully doing it. Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of content creators out there that are building a big following off of this. But yeah, sometimes I'm just like, dang, because I'm like, I'm in it for the love of the game. You know, I like this is what I like to do. And so, yeah, that's tough. That's a tough area. I appreciate your taking the time to speak with me about all this. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for me to find you these

days? So I'm SheNetworks on YouTube, TikTok and X Twitter. And you could also find my podcast is called Breaking the Internet. It's everywhere podcasts are. So it's me, She Networks, and then my co-host Ending with Allie. And those are the best places to find me and my content. And we will, of course, put links to all that in the show notes. Thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I really do appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. Serena Depenzi, she networks mostly on the internet in most places. I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of

choice, along with an angry comment being sure to mention just how many years you've worked for Cisco Tech.