Awesome Job Opportunity

jeremywatts2005

I had an offer for 5 or 6k more and was going to take it. I was all set and ready to jump ship. Then I had a great interview and decided to decline and stay where I was. I took a gamble on myself and said hey you rocked this iView this is your job. I did another 4 iviews over the next two months with the same company. Finally I got the call yesterday and I got the job. I am going to build/develop an incident response team for a technical company. That 5k- 6K seems paltry because I jumped my salary by 25K with this better opportunity. I will be back in management where I enjoy it. Take a look at this and who says job hopping does not pay?

May 2013 68K Company 1 Security Analyst II
Nov 2013 72K Company 2 Infosec Instructor
Jan 2014 80K Company 3 Incident Response Lead
July 2014 112K Company 4 Incident Response Senior
May 2015 147K Company 5 Manager of Incident response
May 2016 ???? Sky is the limit if I can get my CISSP

5 Companies in two years and more than doubled my salary. It is all about being strategic in taking jobs and progressing the salary with good references, building networks, and a lot of salesmanship in the interview. No way was I turning this down plus it is hourly for the first 6 months while I am on probation again

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Comments

coffeeluvr

Congratulations! Great accomplishments!

jeremywatts2005

I am 38 and before 2013 I was pretty much stuck. I started in 1997 at 35K and my salary went up over the yrs, but never exploded. I kept trying to stay with one company. In the process I got laid off twice and had to contract and then go out of field for awhile. My salary exploded after I got some mad management skills from working as a Dean in a for profit school. My Dean salaries were all around 60 K to 75K and highly unstable. Before being a Dean I made mostly 50K to 65K in small towns or towns with little work.

UnixGuy

Excellent job hopping mate! How did you gain the skills to work in Incident response? I'm in a lowly SOC position and want to do something more meaningful like incident response

TheFORCE

Very impressive! Where are you located though? Usually companies don't respond well when they see those type of jumps every few months. Were these contract positions or full time positions? No disrespect to you but if I was a hiring manager, especially for an incident response team I would look for someone with more stable work history since these type of jobs require time to create something meaningful and operational.

jeremywatts2005

I am in Ft Worth Texas so the salary scale I am on now is really good. The cost of living here is great and we do not have state income taxes. The other thing is that there are not a lot of folks doing IR around here. The other thing is the ability to sell yourself and your skills. Making the hiring manager believe you want to be at one company. Which I do in the end. A stable work history in incident response from what I have saw is not something that many bring to the table. Most people got into incident response by changing jobs. These job changes helped them adapt and grow new skills. This is how you sell it in the interview. That is very true and in my case especially true. That is how I ended up in Incident Response. I got into a contract position with the government and finished off my Masters in Digital Forensic Science. That with my other Masters in Information Security I had a lot of background about incident response.

A security engineer is not an incident response engineer nor is a NOC guy or even in some cases a SOC guy. Incident Response is a field in of its own. A lot of security guys think they can make the jump over, but lack skill sets in varying areas. So if you can get into the field and develop a skill set and learn the business like I did then you can find yourself having a lot of opportunities.

I was fortunate an my first SOC manager was a retired Navy Chief Warrant and was heavily involved in DoD and Government Cyber Security jobs and in the military served in Bosnia and other areas for high ranking military members running Comm Ops. The dude knew incident response and most of the models for it. Spend a month locked in a secure vault 12 hours a day for 6 days in a row with the guy teaching you doctrine on IR and how to run incidents you will learn. It was like boot camp almost for IR. Everything from understanding kill chains to knowing who to contact and when to contact for what. Including building playbooks and SOP's.

zxbane

Congrats, sounds like you are in the right place at the right time. Getting that Digital Forensic Science degree seems to be providing a good ROI!

olaHalo

I am also a job hopper
Congrats on your accomplishments

anoeljr

Great job man! And I agree, the cost of living is great here (I'm in Dallas) and no state income taxes are awesome.

alias454

I am looking to move to the Houston area. How are prospects down that way?

Xavor

Maybe I missed it, but years of experience?

jeremywatts2005

Xavor I started in field in 1998. I was laid off twice and had a really rough go to get to where I am at. The turning point was when I took a contract with FEMA and arrived in Louisiana two days after Katrina. From there my career started to pick up. Before that I was doing low level server installs, desktop supports, ACD phone systems, Cash registers, ATM's, printers and other basic support work. It really sucked for the first 7 yrs (1998 - 2005). Especially after 9/11 I like never found work in field with an Associates Degree and a the A+ and N+. I had worked from 1998 - 2002 with a company servicing high end phone systems and more telecom work than IT work. It made a rough transistion back into field. I left the field again in 2007 to work in for profit education as a School Chair and then as a Dean of Academic Affairs (running the entire academic areas). From 2007 to 2013 I was in education it was putting to use my Masters in Infosec and helping me to build management skills. Then I finally got back in field in 2013 and that is the next bump in my career.

kurosaki00

Where you located at? Those are great numbers.
Good job brah

Cyberscum

GJ! I personally would go crazy with the amount of paperwork/managerial work that would req. My type of personality NEEDS tech work on the daily. Glad to hear about the new job though.

pevangel

jeremywatts2005 wrote: »

I am in Ft Worth Texas so the salary scale I am on now is really good.

No kidding! That's awesome!

How do you know when it's time to move on?

dark3d

Hire me and become my mentor.

jeremywatts2005

Pevangel you know it is time to move on with instinct. Looking at the direction of the organization, changes in your department, who is being hired and who is leaving. Start checking around to see what is up with the company.

That is why I started interviewing and found this great job that pays me a bunch more. I keep track in a notebook when I go to a company of daily things occurring so I can remember. Like a record of things that have been ticking me off and things that are disturbing. Companies have no loyalty anymore and it is every man and woman for themselves. That is why I decided to go merc a few years ago and work for the highest bidder. I have no loyalty to any company or any manager. At the end of the day it is my job or their job. They will always choose themselves and just because I am employee does not mean I should not choose myself. It works out well and if the highest bidder thing does not work out you at least have set a bar on your salary. That salary is something others will match or come close to matching when you decide the whole loyalty thing will work out.

pevangel

That's my problem. I get too attached to the company I work for. I've only been with two companies in the four years I've worked in IT.

jeremywatts2005

I just did a little more negotiating and used my current employment to leverage a larger salary. I got my current employer to offer me an FTE position with full benefits. I went back to contract company who was offering me the large salary and told them I was going to have to decline. The told me to hold on and they came back and raised the offer to 147K a year to compensate for benefits. The positive is that I get the higher salary and can leverage that on the contract when I go perm and get them to match it with benefits. All about the negotiation and planning.

jamesenglish

Awesome!