This Network and Cybersecurity Engineering Thing Is Hard (I Just Wanted to Be Cool)
When I first got into network and cybersecurity engineering, I had dreams. Big dreams. I thought I’d be some kind of cyber-James Bond—sipping coffee in a dark room filled with blinking LEDs, typing furiously as firewalls fell and bad guys cried.
What I didn’t picture was me, 12 tabs deep into Reddit, Stack Overflow, and some sketchy Russian forum, trying to figure out why my DHCP server thinks it’s a toaster.
I mean… this stuff is hard. Nobody warned me.
Sure, people said things like “It’ll be challenging” and “Just take it one subnet at a time,” but nobody mentioned the pure existential dread that hits when your ping doesn’t return and you realize you don’t actually know where your traffic is going. Like, did it vanish into the ether? Did a rogue router eat it? Is it on vacation in Aruba?
And don’t even get me started on subnetting. If I had a dollar for every time I messed up a subnet mask, I could buy my own ISP and fire it for not explaining this stuff better. I swear, some of these IP math problems feel like SAT questions written by someone who hates joy.
Then there’s firewalls. Oh, sweet firewalls. One minute you think you’ve nailed the rules, the next minute you’ve accidentally blocked yourself from your own network like a digital vampire who needs an invite. I once locked myself out of SSH, panicked, and spent an hour Googling solutions—only to realize I blocked my own IP. Bravo, me. Bravo.
Cybersecurity? That’s where things get spicy. I thought it was going to be all elite hacker stuff and slick command-line kung fu. Instead, I’m stuck doing threat assessments that read like crime novels written by robots: “Suspicious logon from IP 198.51.100.42.” And suddenly I’m yelling at my computer like a CSI detective—“WHO ARE YOU, 198.51.100.42?!”
Let’s not forget patching. Oh, sweet merciful patching. It’s a simple update, they said. It’ll only take five minutes, they said. Next thing I know, the update broke DNS, the backup DNS is in a coma, and I’m praying to every digital deity that users don’t notice Teams isn’t loading.
But in the middle of the madness—when the ports line up, the configs click, and the logs tell a clean story—it feels glorious. Like you tamed the chaos. Like you are, in fact, the techno-wizard you dreamed of being. Until your VPN breaks again because someone unplugged the FortiGate “just to clean behind it.”
So yeah. This network and cybersecurity engineering thing? It’s not easy. It’s not always glamorous. Sometimes it’s just you, a command prompt, and a crying fit at 3 a.m.
But I keep coming back. Because deep down, I love the puzzle. I love the “a-ha!” moment. I love telling the internet, “No, you don’t get to talk to port 445 today.”
Also, I already bought the books, so… I’m in too deep.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a rogue DHCP server to hunt. Again.
P.S. If you’re new, bring snacks. And maybe a stress ball. Or five.