Guest Speaker Series: Words From Old Friends — Mike Duong and Steve Seiden
By: Vincent Le
Tags: Guest Blogging, Cybersecurity, Cloud Services

With the end line close in sight, Cyber Defenders were visited by two returning mentors, Mike and Steve. Mike and Steve had humble beginnings, both from UC Santa Cruz and UC Irvine respectively. With wide eyes and open ears, the program comprising mostly of community college students welcomed the two speakers.

Mike and Steve enunciating the importance of EQ to the Cyber Defenders

In essence, the two speakers shared invaluable insights on the ever evolving industry — Cybersecurity. Both of them, pull from years of service dedicated to their respective roles in the field. Their extensive experience led them to different facets in the cybersecurity stream as they eventually found their footing in roles more tailored to their liking.

Some Background

Mike thought of himself as someone who enjoyed working with customers and building interpersonal relationships, or the customer facing side as he called it. He found himself interacting with customers as a support engineer and then eventually moved on to professional services, working ahead of the sales cycle on most occasions. Now, he works as a Sales Engineer at Netskope, really driving the tip of the spear in terms of sales.

On the other hand, Steve is the director of Data Center operations at Shape Security, a role more so acquainted to the non-customer facing end. He had previously managed data centers for various big enterprises and is responsible for handling underlying infrastructures, such as data centers and public/private clouds, and making sure everything runs smoothly. Steve mentioned that his childhood hero was Hulk Hogan, although he chose not to bore us with why that is.

Our Takeaways

The road to success does not come without divergence; Keep an open mind.

Our speakers stressed the fact that there are many facets and alleyways that will present itself in industry. There are a multitude of different openings on any given day for any given line of work. In this sense, our speakers asked of us to keep an open mind, because we won’t know where we could potentially end up.

Learn to learn in an evolving field; There is a balance to everything.

Cyber security is a dynamic landscape. Skills learnt today may not be applicable tomorrow, so what should we do? The answer is to hone our soft skills, that means improving our ability to interact with others. While having all the technical skill possible is nice, the truth is technology is a revolving door and workers must dance to the tune of technological advancement. Therefore, it is imperative that we have the soft skills necessary to move from company to company, from team to team. Because up until the point that technological singularity happens, humans are the ones delegating pay, managing teams, and handling sales. However, that does not render technical skill useless, it’s necessary to have a balance of both.

Security comes in many forms, but the best security is a multi-pronged defense.

Our speakers gave us perspective into the reality of security in all its glory. Steve made a simple analogy. Take a house. A truly secure household does not have just one security system in it; it needs a combination of many things to truly be secure. For instance cameras, alarms, even guard dogs. That same concept of security is true in cyber security. There is no one product solution that is all inclusive in security. There is no one size fits all fix.

Four qualities for a stable career

In addition to all the knowledge bombs that our speakers dropped on us, Steve provided some important qualities that single one of us should strive to have. These four pillars, as Steve noted, would help us get hired:

High Listening IQ: Being able to listen, process, and organize your thoughts. Resourcefulness: Being able to take initiative and solve problems with perseverance Coachable: Too many people think too highly of themselves, be able to listen to others Emotional Maturity: Steve gave an anecdote from his Dad, — life is a series of adjustments. If you don’t learn to adapt, you’re the one who’s going to have a hard time. Just because thing don’t go your way, how do you react? We must learn how to adjust and adapt to all kinds of situations in the workplace.

Three themes for the four pillars

On top of the four pillars Steve mentioned above, there was a common theme between those four pillars. These themes are also something we should strive for, that no one could take away from us, as Steve said.