Moving on and Moving Up

The inevitable has happened. I am leaving my current job, and moving on to a new company. I am very excited about this new opportunity. The company I am going to work for seems like a great place to work. However, this will be the first time my family has moved to a location where we don't know anybody. We will have no friends and no family there. This is the part of this field that isn't so great. Jobs tend to crop up in very specific places, and you have to be ready to pick up and move in order to not lose a great opportunity. It was a hard decision to sacrifice all the personal reasons to stay in favour of all the professional reasons to move. We have family, and friends here that we love very much. We like this area after being here only two years. My children will no longer be able to see their grandparents so often. However I will be moving to a larger, more mature company, in  a great area. The team I will be working with is full of very bright people who take this work very seriously. Even more importantly, the members of my new team know lots of things I don't. I will be working to learn a lot from them, and that is something I am eager to start doing.

Robert Khoo over at Penny Arcade said something in one of their tv episodes, that has stuck with me since. He told a potential employee "To be successful at something, to be like the best of breed at something, means you make sacrifices.I would say nine times out of ten, that means your social life, and that is how you get amazing at something." I think that this is extremely true. Nobody ever got to be the best at something by putting in the same amount of effort as everyone else. You get to be the best by putting in more effort than everyone else, and working as hard as you possibly can. I don't know if I can ever be the best at what I do, but I won't stop trying until I am. I have a long way to go before I can be the next RSnake, lcamtuf, or Tavis Ormandy. The best part of being in this field is that those very people I wish to be better than, will help me along the way. It may not be in a big way, but each of those three people have helped me grow already. Each of them have even taken the time to reply to emails and blogposts.  These are people who will honestly share ideas and knowledge. That, more than anything else, is what makes this field great. So look out guys, one day soon you may be reading a white paper with my name on it. In the meantime I just want to say thank you to all of you, as well as Mark Russinovich over at Microsoft, for taking time out of busy lives to answer a few stupid questions from somebody you've never heard of...yet.