Cybersecurity Veteran Shares Survival Lessons for a Brutal Job Market

Dark Reading’s Becky Bracken speaks with cybersecurity veteran Hal Pomeranz about career anxiety during what he describes as an “unprecedentedly bad job market”. Pomeranz, an independent consultant specialising in incident response, digital forensics and expert-witness work, draws on experience of the dot-com crash and the later property-market downturn.

He says those periods brought unemployment, financial pressure and doubts about professional identity, and compares today’s AI-driven technology cycle with earlier contractions.

Pomeranz argues that professionals should prepare before downturns arrive by developing relationships and broadening their skills. He credits skills in educational software development and connections outside operational IT with helping him change direction after the dot-com bubble burst.

His recommendations include learning one substantial, non-adjacent technical skill each year, building networks before they are urgently needed, and prioritising local user groups, meet-ups and alumni networks over large conferences. He also encourages experienced practitioners to support others through mentoring, free educational material and public writing.

The discussion addresses imposter syndrome as well. Pomeranz says that, despite five decades working with computers, he recently felt like “the dumbest noob on the planet” while learning an ELK-stack architecture involving OpenSearch and Lucene. His advice is to accept being a beginner repeatedly and recognise that experts also struggle with unfamiliar concepts.

He adds that social media generally displays people’s curated highlights rather than the routine work and difficulties behind them, and says asking the close-knit cybersecurity community for help can lead to support and new opportunities.