Let me get this out of the way: yes, I know we’re living in the Age of AI. Machines are writing essays, generating art, chatting like therapists, and possibly plotting to take over your job while pretending to be helpful productivity tools. Meanwhile, “the cloud” isn’t just where your embarrassing high school photos live—it’s where your entire business infrastructure has gone on vacation (with no plans of coming back).
And here I am, saying: “Hey! I want to be a network and cybersecurity engineer!”
Like I just announced I want to sell VHS tapes in the age of Netflix.
But hold on—this job isn’t just relevant. It’s absolutely, undeniably, hilariously essential. Let me explain.
Someone Has to Keep the Robots from Arguing with the Toasters
Picture this: Your smart fridge is arguing with your smart thermostat over who gets more bandwidth, and Alexa is screaming in the corner because the firewall decided she was a threat (she is, by the way). Who you gonna call?
Not ChatGPT.
Not Siri.
Not even that one guy in accounting who’s “pretty good with computers.”
You need someone who knows what a VLAN is, who speaks fluent subnetting, who can sniff packets like a bloodhound on Red Bull—and who can do it all without asking AI to write a bash script every 3 minutes.
You need me.
AI Might Be Smart, But It’s Also Kind of Clueless
Sure, AI can write code, detect anomalies, and generate firewall configs in 0.2 seconds. But give it a weird DNS loop or a rogue DHCP server and it’ll start hallucinating like a hippie at Burning Man. AI doesn’t get nuance. It doesn’t know that “coffee_maker_5” suddenly requesting 40GB of outbound traffic might be a sign of Skynet going live.
I want to be the human with common sense and a Wireshark capture who says,
“Nah, that’s not normal. Pull the plug. And also, please stop connecting random appliances to the guest network.”
Cloud? Cool. But Let’s Not Pretend It’s Magic
People say “cloud” like it’s some kind of miracle fog that fixes everything. But the cloud is really just someone else’s server with a cooler name and a monthly bill that makes you cry.
Cloud services break. Cloud services misconfigure themselves. Cloud services are like IKEA furniture—easy to admire, confusing to assemble, and dangerous if you skip the documentation.
That’s why I want to be a cybersecurity engineer—because when your cloud has a thunderstorm, I want to be the one holding the umbrella, not the one googling “how to un-delete an entire Azure subscription.”
Because Let’s Face It: Nothing Screams “Hero” Like Stopping a Ransomware Attack
Firefighters get flames. Doctors get heartbeats. I get alerts at 3 AM that say:
“Suspicious login from Uzbekistan to SCADA server.”
And you know what? That’s my kind of adrenaline.
There’s a weird kind of joy in stopping a DDoS attack, hardening a network, or writing a security policy that prevents some dude from installing Call of Duty on the Domain Controller again. It’s thrilling. It’s exhausting. It’s occasionally soul-crushing. But it’s also meaningful.
And unlike AI, I still enjoy coffee. Which makes me more fun at meetings.
Final Thoughts (Before the Cloud Logs Me Out)
In a world run by AI and floating in the cloud, network and cybersecurity engineers are the last line of defense against chaos, cluelessness, and compromised credentials. We’re the guardians of the grid, the bouncers of the digital party, the Gandalf of the gateways yelling “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” to malware.
So yes, I want to be that.
Because someone has to keep the machines from accidentally ordering 15 toasters on Amazon.
And that someone is me.