Over 70% of cybersecurity professionals often have to work weekends to address security concerns at their organization, according to a new report by Bitdefender.
This intense workload appears to correlate strongly with job dissatisfaction, with around two-thirds (64%) of the 1200 cyber professionals surveyed stating that they are planning on looking for a new job in the next 12 months.
The issue of burnout and job dissatisfaction was particularly profound among UK respondents, with 81% often working weekends and 71% looking for a new job.
High availability and security are the bane of IT infrastructure jobs. It makes me anxious to think about my MSP days when I’d sit on my couch on a Saturday fully aware that I’m one phone call away from having my day, weekend or even the next two weeks ruined because some customer CEO has full domain admin rights and would give them to anyone who’d ask on the phone or via email.
It’s not just security that ruins an IT person’s life. I had a customer decide to do a massive data migration from their primary data storage to a new system during the busiest time of day. It destroyed the primary, secondary, and backup systems as well as corrupting the destination system. It was a one-in-a-million bug/glitch that cost me 2 weeks of 16 hour days.
It’s idiots in charge of IT that are the true source of our pain.
My org has a follow-the-sun rule and avoids having people work on weekends. It helps that it’s a global team, so there’s only around maybe 18-20 hours in the middle of the weekend where it’s not a Monday or Friday somewhere in the world.
My company doesn’t work weekends unless you’re on call or something. I could see it happen with incident response or security operations, but other things aren’t so critical that we need to have our staff working outside of normal business hours.
I may be lucky as well because I work within GRC, and we have a huge focus on work-life balance.
This 70% number seems high. I’m in leadership.
No shit
And ~100% of cybersecurity pros work ad hoc 100% of the time…
They probably put in 2-10 hours of actual work in a given week. Just like any desk job that doesn’t sit on zoom calls all day.
Edit: 100% of people downvoting this should first Google “ad hoc.” Or are just envious that I have a cybersec job making good money doing nothing all day. Sucks to suck. 🤷♂️
Kinda how ~100% of IT salaried positions work. If you’re confused, you’re probably hourly.
If you’re paying someone to always be on call then they are always working. Just because you don’t always need them doesn’t mean they aren’t working. You’re paying for their availability.
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He clearly was typing on his phone and his message was obvious.
I agree with this but I think point is that yes they are on call all the time but in exchange they get a lot of down time to live their lives.
Not sure it is fair I don’t work like that and I don’t think I can.
Nurse model seems to make more sense where there is on call list and you get paid for that time.
IMO sitting at my desk, watching logs or waiting for something to come in isn’t living my life. I can’t do my hobbies, I can’t play video games, drink a beer, watch a movie, hang out with my friends, etc. Browsing lemmy or youtube isn’t exactly living my life. As long as I’m at that desk, I’m working.
All fair points and agree… If I am on the clock, I am working. Work flow is management issue
That could work, if you had a large pool of these people to put on the on call list. Most companies do not. And only having every other weekend off is not living.
Sounds like a management issue IMHO
Maybe people should organize and deny these leaders cheap labour?
100% but in general there are too few people that possess the skills for this work. So they are hard to find and expensive.
Sounds like the sort of challenging market conditions executives get paid big money to solve…
I know god forbid these people have to do any work lol
True… very true
Since we’re telling people to Google things, try “anecdotal fallacy” and let us know if it helps you to understand the source of the downvotes.
The OP is about survey data that directly contradicts your position. It’s fantastic that you’ve found a position where you have work/life balance that works so well for you, but it simply doesn’t match the experience of many commenting in this thread or those who were surveyed.
Be as obstinate as you like, it won’t change the lived experiences of others in the industry.
If your cybersecurity and/or SecOps team isn’t working 40 hrs a week, you’re either WAY over staffed or you’re missing out on a lot of proactive security work. Ours has a massive backlog of tickets and is working proactively on protecting and preventing incursions and security incidents.
Lol he’s got 5 people for 700 users. Way overstaffed. Or well-staffed at a minimum.
700 users is a business group in my world.
No, SOAR tools make life pretty easy. 5 person SOC team + boss, 700 person org. Not overstaffed.
I get a few alerts every few hours. Investigate, determine if false positive, and go back to gaming. Unless it’s the off chance it’s not a false positive. Then I do an hour of work or so. Then back to gaming.
No alert development, threat hunting, or ML research? No upskilling of any kind? Must be nice to work at a company with no impact to the world when it gets popped.
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You are one of these people that also thinks the utility companies sit on their ass while they are not performing a break-fix aren’t you?
If anything security means ploughing through logs, checking up on monitoring alerts. And most importantly constant lobbying with the devs and deployment projects to actually take security serious… yes we know it is easier to deploy without ssl, single sign on, firewall, monitoring suite and not using our template but your own custom OS install etc… but this means everything is fucked if something happens and noone will be able to tell why. And No you cannot just deploy the database cluster in the DMZ so that it is easier to access.
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You are the one that said these people do 2-10 hours of work a week and I tried to tell you that there is so much more to the domain of security.
So you kinda told us a lot about yourself with your denigrating remark.
Oh boohoo, you make 6 figures and have to work some weekends. Get over yourselves or better yet, get a job outside of a cubicle. Every job is going to have it’s good aspects and shitty aspects.
So would you rather work weekends, or up on a roof in the Florida sun?
False dichotomy, so neither. Things are more work-life balancey in Europe.
You gotta understand the skill set is highly specialized and is ever-evolving. The issue likely being that many take on their six figure salary and aren’t paid for their weekend work but instead work to ensure the security of the employer.
If I’m hired for $120k/yr for a 40hr week, but I’m pulling 46-52hr weeks, I would feel the need to be appropriately compensated for it. If it’s going to be considered a work hazard I would expect to receive hazard pay.
Some weekends? These roles are hard to fill so usually chronically understaffed, meaning most weekends.
And even if you like the work, the volume is an issue burning people out on the role.
