Over the passed couple of days, I’ve had images pop up in my feed showing people’s workstations, most often with multiple screens. I’ve seen various configurations, some with three or more screens, but the other thing I’ve noted is that for those social media profiles, there’s little else that’s shared.

Yep, they have a nifty configuration, one that they want to show off, but there’s little to no attempts to show off their skills and abilities, what they’ve actually done with that configuration.

Within cybersecurity, we see a lot of that, as well with certifications, commercial product licenses, and even open-source distributions - you know, those DVDs or VMs where someone else pulls together a list of free and open-source tools, puts a fancy background and/or menu system on it. A lot of these distros often derive their “value” from how new they are, or how many tools are included...but rarely do we see, “...yeah, and this is how I used this distro to solve a case...”, or anything close to that.

We often collect these things, like badges or challenge coins, but is someone* really* a better analyst if they have 4 instead of 3 screens? I honestly don’t know...never having been able to afford multiple screens myself, I’ve spent the past 28 yrs operating off of single laptop screen. And yes, I have used some of those open-source tools, but I’m not a huge fan of distributions.

All of this means that I tend to value something completely different from what the more vocal folks within the industry tend to value. I look to folks trying to develop and share processes and experiences that have the potential to change the direction of the industry.