CYBERSECURITY veteran Hal Pomeranz has described the current technology employment market as “an unprecedentedly bad job market”, drawing on his experience of earlier downturns, including the dot-com crash and the collapse of the property bubble. In an interview with Dark Reading published on 16 September 2026, Pomeranz said those periods left him without work and concerned about both finances and losing access to work he found meaningful.
He argued that cybersecurity professionals should recognise self-doubt as a normal part of learning, noting that he still felt like “the dumbest noob on the planet” while working with OpenSearch, Lucene and a new ELK-stack architecture.
Pomeranz’s advice is to prepare for economic contractions before they happen by developing skills outside one’s immediate speciality and building professional relationships early. He said his previous move from operational IT into educational software development was possible because he had cultivated relevant skills and connections before the dot-com downturn.
His broader recommendation is to learn one significant new, non-adjacent technical skill each year, while treating mentorship and sharing free educational material as ways to support the next generation. For people seeking opportunities or feeling isolated by social-media portrayals of industry events, he recommends local user groups, meet-ups and alumni networks over relying solely on large conferences. He also encourages professionals to ask for help, arguing that the cybersecurity community is generally willing to support those who reach out.