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.
Change Windows. You can’t take shit down during the work day.
Everywhere I’ve worked (many very large companies, banks, telecom, outsourced IT, etc) teams have coverage schedules, so I suspect this article is misleading.
Someone has to mind things 24/7, this is done via scheduling.
And the more critical you are, the more on-call you are. I had one role where I was on call 24/7. Things rarely broke enough for me to be called, but I never once resented when I was called. I’d rather get woken up at 2am because my help is needed than have the risk that our systems aren’t ready for the day.
Not to mention that lots of malicious attacks occur late at night or on weekends in an attempt to delay getting noticed. My company has rotating on-call schedules for our security, devops, and even engineering teams. I’ve had to hop on late at night or on weekends to help mitigate attacks. Luckily my employer is really good about letting folks take a day or two off after such events.
This shows a really low Bus Factor which should be remedied. If you’re on call 24/7 because you’re the only person who can fix things then your employer is running the risk of you being unavailable due to injury or disease and then they’re up shit creek sans paddle.
There are no bad employees only bad managers, or some karate kid nonsense like that. I had a job where I was “on call” 24/7 with no one else as alternates. I kept getting in trouble for not being available on the weekend when they called me. Most of the other employees I worked with in similar positions admitted to drinking every night that way they couldn’t get called in after hours. I quit that job quick.
that is if they actually allow you to make the changes so the systems are reliable.
theres always some boss that doesn’t want to swallow his pride and you pay the price for it.
That wouldn’t be cybersecurity though, right? That sounds more like a (dev)OPs role.