Ángel: My personal career journey

My name is Ángel, and I'm a Security Engineer at Google.
There were a number of things in my life that led me to security.
One of them was definitely curiosity when I was growing up.
My parents are accountants, and so they had pocket calculators and mechanical pencils and pens.
And I was always breaking them up and taking pieces apart and trying to figure out how they work.
This led me to technology in general, and the same concept applied again—just trying to figure out how things work and breaking them.
That's basically what security's trying to do: breaking things to figure out whether or not somebody else could break them before you do.
I started as a network engineer.
This was setting up firewalls, setting up switches and routers for different companies.
I wanted to join cybersecurity mostly because I felt very motivated about the things that were going on in the industry.
Project Aurora was Google getting hacked by a foreign actor.
I was reading this and I was thinking, "I wish I could work with the people that are working on this on the front lines." When I was starting to get into cybersecurity and I wanted to make a jump in my career, what I wanted to learn, where I needed to be.
One example is learning automation through Python.
I took online classes, I completed certifications—security certifications, very popular ones—and then I just started to incorporate some of these aspects into my current job.
When I was moving from Mexico to the U.S.
to work here, I had to learn how to be flexible.
You have to learn new things in order to advance your career.
Sometimes even you have to learn new things just to stay at the same spot you are.
In security, I think in all of technology, but especially in security, you constantly have to reinvent yourself, keep learning how things work, and keep learning how you can help the industry.
One important skill throughout my life and in my career as a cybersecurity professional is resiliency.
I learned a lot about resiliency when I first moved here in the U.S.
and things didn't go the way I expected them to, and I have to keep trying new things and hope for the best.
And that is really no different from what we do as security professionals.
We do this on a day-to-day basis.
We have to either figure out ways to make things work, we have to figure out ways to make projects function the way we need them to, or we have to figure out ways to get past a problem.
We need more professionals in cybersecurity with different backgrounds, and that means different experiences, different ways of seeing things, different ways of approaching and solving problems.
We need more people like you in this industry.