 Hello, D'Afghan. Good afternoon. Thanks for showing up. This is not a technical talk. If you're looking for something cool, you shouldn't be here. If you hate your boss, this is the right place to be. Okay, I got 20 minutes to go through whatever I thought was cool to talk about this. Real quick, my name is Luis Eduardo, also known as Affen. Hope my PowerPoint skills improved since last year. So one thing we're going to talk about is the agenda. What are we going to be talking about? Number one, yeah, I didn't learn PowerPoint. It fucking sucks. There we go. The motivation, the introduction, the usual stuff. Talk about what kind of hacker jobs we find these days in the market and the market status. Okay, now I feel big. Market status, what's the status of the information security slash market for hackers to work on? How we became corporate whores? How we turned into corporate? The major challenge that we have as workers, we always have a boss no matter what. How many, some of our mistakes, some of the shit that we complain about, guess what? It's our own fault and maybe we can improve that. And again, how to try to fix this and I have a conclusion, hopefully. See? This doesn't work. So anyways, who the hell am I? I've been working for corporations for about 18 years. I know I look 22 but no, it's not the case. Been working for quite a while, working all kinds of companies. By the accent, you know I'm not from here. Born and raised in Brazil, been working in the US for over 10 years and lived in Asia for a while. So I've seen a little bit of different companies, different cultures, everything else. And actually the main motivation to do this talk was about three years ago. And when I put my professional life into perspective and I thought, you know what? Why do we, not only me because I hear all my friends too and co-workers, why the hell do we complain so much about our jobs, right? It's really hard for us to say, wow, this was an awesome job, an awesome day at work. Sometimes it happens but it's not that often. Guess what? So I started thinking about this. I'm like, why does this suck so bad? So that's kind of the idea. Besides working and traveling too much, I help with the wireless network here. And I am one of the co-organizers of a conference down in Brazil called, You Shot the Shove. That was a joke. So again, I gave a talk kind of about this as part of the motivation. I gave a talk kind of about this three years ago. And first talk at DEF CON, you know, who here saw Johnny Long's talk when he says, How cool was your first, and how horrible was your first DEF CON talk, right? You're walking with the speaker badge, you know, they had badges at that time. And guess what? You're scared as hell of you guys. Well, my talk sucked. But some of the ideas were good. And since then I've been through different companies and kind of like kept thinking about all this. So this year I said, you know what? I think it's about time to talk a little bit about this. So this is the motivation. So getting to the whole thing, why the hell do we hate our jobs? Usually we say, my job sucks. Not everyone. I know people and usually people in our industry that they really like and sometimes they really love their jobs. And that's awesome because it's really amazing to do what you love. And we're in the industry that, one of the few industries, that you can actually do what you love and make money with it. And since then, ever since three years, the industry was already really mature. But ever since then, the industry, our industry, evolved so much. So that's kind of cool. We get hackers doing what they used to do for free and making money. Isn't that freaking cool? So that's one of the deals. So why do we hate our jobs? Not we. I put that wrong there. I'm just doing the slides there now. Why do people hate their jobs? Because mostly, Chi Chi, sorry. Again, PowerPoint is not my thing. So why do we hate it? You simply don't like what you do. Somehow you end up doing what you're not the right person to do or that thing that you're doing is not the right thing. Not that thing at the time, but that product or the whole thing. You're in the wrong. Your job in your, whatever, in your business card is wrong. Or you don't get paid enough. None of us are ever happy with our salary, right? Or you're just okay. You can come to the Afghan. You can come here, have a beer or a tan or too many. And see cool talks and go back home and wait another year for Dafcon. Is that good for you? Maybe it is. You pay your bills. And that happens in every single industry. So that's the whole thing. So why don't we change it? Because usually we're scared of changes. That's what a human being does, right? We're scared of changing anything in our lives. So let's get to the point. If you go to Google and you put hacker job, today you find some stuff that is actually relevant to what we do. Probably if you did that 10 years ago, that would be weird. Well, Google wasn't, well, was around, but anyways. So it is important that today we know there's a market for what we do. No matter what you do, the industry is so huge. You can work with incident handling. You can do pen testing. You can do security research. You can break shit. You can fix shit. You can protect shit. It's amazing. And even if you look at Hollywood, everything evolved through Hollywood, right? Hollywood back in the day, movie hackers, of course. These were the hackers at the time. And then we got the Matrix. And then we got our Mr. Firewall totally corporate there. And we got the underground guy getting paid a lot of money to do whatever he's got to do there to make that guy richer. Don't you guys hate your iPhone when you have a timer and it messes up? There we go. Fucking Apple. So anyways, so getting to the point that matters, right? Why, every time, this is my 10th DEF CON, we used to hear this more often than we do today, but usually you hear, and my day job is this. Why can't your day job be what you love? Today, the industry allows you to do that. And of course, you're not going to find a job around the corner. Actually, here you might find a job around the corner, but usually today is easier than before. So we shouldn't be complaining of our jobs these days. That's the point. And it goes beyond this, right? This is what it used to be. You know your shit. You say, I'm good. You're going to be doing what you do. And people have to, like, it doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter what time you do. People are going to buy your product. People are going to buy your services. Guess what? It changed. So you kind of have to adapt for that. If you're away, if you're stubborn, like some people are. And we're going to talk about ego in a little bit in the next 10 minutes. It's really hard to do that. But at the end of the day, you want money. You've got to pay your bills. So you're doing what you love. You know your shit. You're going to do what you love. And hopefully at the end of the day, you want to be a rock star. You want to end up in bed with her and her tattoos. So that's cool. I'm sorry. Too fast, right? Moving on. So my thinking about this whole thing. Our industry, although it is quite mature, it's kind of like a fast food market. Because it's really fast moving. People who, not all the people, right? Our generation, our not mine. Our the cool people that are outside there. It's all about fast results. Zero days, right? You want that. Fast money, fast results, fast spending. Driving your cars and shit like that. But guess what? People forget about their career path. Is that important? Unfortunately, yes. Unless you have that embedded in your job. That might be part of it. Sometimes it's not. What else about the market? If you think about, like we're here, we're having fun, right? Defconn fucking rocks. And this week here in Vegas, we have other conferences. But this is the week of the year that we pay attention to security, right? With a few exceptions. But anyways, how many people we got here this week? Probably around 15,000, 20,000 people from the security market. Split or within Black Hat and Defconn. How many people are actually in the market? Let's say that the people that are here are the people that actually care about what the fuck they're doing. And how about the other people? Right? You might have work for a company that says security on the name. Where the hell are they? That's... I see, personally, that as a problem. And if they're not here, if they don't send people here, or if they don't allow their people to be here, that's scary. So again, everybody knows that people come for Defconn, for the party, and seen the friends that usually just talk on IRC and things like that. But again, it's not only this. Networking is important. People got jobs here. People learn a lot here. Again, it's the dynamics of that. Back in the day, any other industry, any other company, how did it work? You start at a company when you're 18, 20, whatever, right after school. And guess what? The objective of your life was to end working for that company, was to retire after 30 years. If you failed in quotes for that, that was bad. In our industry, that doesn't happen at all. We're in the sweet spot. We're in the cool place. Sounds like weird, but you can make a difference for yourself working in this industry before we break it, because we're getting to corporate, right? So once you go corporate, there's a problem with that. Sorry, I'm following my slides here too. So once you go corporate, there's one problem. And we were talking at the bar two nights ago. Your boss, right? And that's what we complain the most. iPhone, bear with me. Who here manages people? Awesome. Who hates your boss? With those included. Okay, wow. Awesome. So anyways, it's really good that the majority of you don't hate your bosses, and some of you manage people. That's awesome. But you can deal with that. So the conversation we were having the other night was exactly what, so what's your talk going to be about? Oh, about hackers and going corporate and things like that. But guess what? I work for myself. So what? You have sometimes the best job ever because you're controlling your time and everything else. You have the worst job ever too, because every day you have a new customer, every day that customer is your boss. So you don't have the consistency of a good person or the consistency of a douchebag, right? So you got to deal with it. No matter who you are. If you're the number one hacker, we all know he has customers too, right? So you got to adhere by the rules. You got to go by the policies, the company policies, the customer policies, the contract, whatever. And you got to follow those. If you don't follow that, if you decide that everything is wrong and go by yourself, there's a possibility. If you work for a small company and people hear you, that's awesome and things are going to change. If you work for a large corporation, like the Death Star, that might be your future if you try to be a rebel. So I guess if we stay corporate, you got to follow the rules. Then we go to the problem, right? Your boss. Number one thing in our industry that freaking sucks. And again, I'm not a manager. I report to people on some of the wireless. Some of the conferences that I help with, with the network, sometimes I manage people. So that doesn't count, but I kind of see both sides. But one of the things that I learned throughout the years, and of course we cannot generalize this, this of course has always, there is an exception and thank God in this case, the good ones. And I've seen the good and bad is that in our industry, since we got the legacy of so many other things that didn't understand our information security thing, right? They make really good, are actually great engineers, managers. These people are socially challenged, right? We cannot deal with people sometimes. We hate freaking people. I don't like people that much, you know? And that's the problem. So when you get a bad boss, usually, and that's, I ask a lot of people, okay? And usually it's the kindergarten cop kind of approach, right? It's like that micromanaging kind of like going, oh, you shouldn't do this, you shouldn't do that, but not to you, to everyone. Making, sending like emails, telling people, you know what, you shouldn't be doing this, but it's not for everyone. 50 people, and suddenly like because one or two did something, you keep doing that. Don't do that. Don't make the guy feel bad. Call him aside, say, don't take this in a really bad way, but it's, you should have a better approach for that. I got two minutes. I gotta go really fast. So even though your boss might be the best person ever, do not expect him to be your best friend forever, you know? Your BFF might not be your boss. Don't do your job expecting that. Challenges that they run, and most for the people that are here, they do not manage people, they report to people. But the challenges are really interesting when I talk to some people. Again, this is all common sense, but it's the major one that sometimes we don't see is that hackers are really passionate on whatever they do. The problem is that what I'm passionate about might not be aligned with the business need for a certain project. Guess what? That's a problem, right? The company has to make money. You have to be effective, and sometimes you just don't want to do that. So other things that people have to deal with us is the ego, and we almost don't have that, right? So sometimes working as a team or in a team is problematic. We can go to a bar here and disagree all day long. We're all bright people. We all have our ideas. Keep in mind that you have, if you work for somebody else or if you work for yourself, whatever, there's a need for that project. Try to follow that project. If there are policies, remember that your boss... Sorry, that's the ego in five seconds. Remember that your boss has to follow policies, too. Policies are stupid, but guess what? They exist for your reason, too. Some people take too much advantage of our new market. So make sure that you don't take too much advantage of it. We're going to talk about that a little bit. And motivation, a pat in the back. Guy did something cool. Send him an email telling him, hey, that was cool. Hey, if you did something really great, give him a gift card. Give him something, you know? People like to be rewarded, not only in our industry, in all industries. Talking about taking advantage of what you do, of all the liberty that you have. Five, two, one, five. Oh, I got five. So, as I was telling my girlfriend, it's like working in a bar. You're the bartender. You have all the booze around you. If you take advantage of that, you're screwed. You're going to be cropped every night. You're going to be fired. Bar is not going to make money, and that's really bad. You know? You're going to die. So do not take too much advantage of it. Take in a good way, right? You have the resources. You have the company resources. You have the time available. If you think about other people that don't do what we do, sometimes they say, I don't have time to do this. Well, you make your time. So use it wisely. The other thing is ethics. Again, you work for a company. You have the company time. Sometimes you do a lot of work there, and then you go home, you do your final touches on your zero day, and you say, it's mine. I did it. Yes, you did, but mostly on company time. Remember about the whole ethics thing. Sometimes people are not going to give a damn about whatever you're doing, but sometimes, if they find out, and this industry is really small. We talk about 12,000 people here. This is really small. So if you burn your bridges, if you burn your integrity, you're pretty much done for your life. Talking about your professional life, of course, hopefully. So at the end of the day, it's all about trust and balance. Unfortunately, you have to trust, well, you've got to, obviously, this is a given, right? You have to do the best at whatever you do. If you're not happy, you've got to fuck out. But you've got to trust your boss. Sometimes it's really hard, but you have to trust that your boss has got your back. He has you to do something, or if he told you to do whatever you want, he's going to back you up. The other thing is get your stuff done. That's the premise. And if possible, get a mentor, get a guru. Try to find somebody that is going to help you guide you inside the company, outside the company. Sometimes it's good within the company. Sometimes it's good outside the company. But find somebody who can guide you through the thing. Sometimes people saw or went through whatever you've been going through that they've seen before. Sometimes the monster is not that big. Kind of a conclusion. If you do what you love, so, conclusion. You've got to do, like, in my mind, three things. Number one, do what you love. If you do what you love and you're here, awesome. Because I think you're good, right? You can come to Vegas, have fun, have beers, and crash to somebody's room and be happy. If you don't, but you're working for a good company, your company, or if you see a career path, if you see a light at the end of the tunnel, go for it, you know? It's a trade there, but, you know, in the long run that's good. Or if you make a lot of money, and I mean a lot of money. If you don't, if you don't have the two, the first two, but you make a lot of money, that's good. But look for something else that might not pay as much as you're making, but you do something that you love. Because that's important, that's what you've got to do. You've got to, if you do what you love, it's much easier. Let's put it this way. Lastly, if you don't do any of the three, you're fucked. You're fine, you better leave Daft Con with a job. So don't get in trouble, because at the end of the day it's going to buy you back. I think I've done it. So that's my contact information. I don't, I usually reply to all of my emails. I don't think there's any doubts about this. This is mostly common sense, but unfortunately in the corporate life we see a lot of nonsense shit. So that's it. Questions, I'm going to be in room Capri 106. Thank you very much.