You Don't Need to Start as a Teen to be an Ethical Hacker (Video)

Meet Justin Whitehead. While a lot of his contemporaries were going to college, he became an Airborne soldier. After that he went to college, became an IT technian, got some experience as a Computer Forensic Analyst, and met people who looked like they were having a good time as penetration testers. So he took some recommended classes,got hired by One World Labs, and last week at B-Sides Austin, he and coworker Antonio Herraiz gave a talk titled 'Spanking the monkey/How pen testers can do it better.

Justin is 40, an age where a lot of people in the IT game worry about being over the hill and unemployable. But Justin's little video talk should give you hope -- whether you're a mature college student, have a stalled IT career or are thinking about a career change but want to keep working with computers and IT in general. It seems that there are decent IT-related jobs out there even if you're not a youngster; and even if you didn't start working with computers until you were in your 20s or 30s.

Comments

Mostly this

[s.petry]

But I have to add that all of the hype is plain old wrong if you want to be a career IT security specialist. Hacking, or actually performing a penetration test, is a very small portion of the job. Seems like all of the hype around coding currently to try and flood the market with people thinking they can "hack" to reduce wages may be happening here. I don't know if that's true or not, but seems reasonable given the treatment of "coders" lately.

I was also confused at the "people over 40 can't find jobs" stuff, because after I hit 40 my desirability went way up. Maturity, especially in IT security, is a well sought after trait.