Tanya Janca — Mentoring Monday — 5 Minute AppSec

0:05Chris RomeoThe Application Security Podcast. Here we go. Hey folks, this is Chris Romeo, co-host of the Application Security Podcast, and you are listening to an experiment that we're calling 5 Minute AppSec. On this first in-between-isode, I guess we'll call it, We're going to hear from Tanya Janca as she talks about Mentoring Monday and the importance of mentoring for us as a security community. Tanya is excited about mentoring. She started a hashtag on Twitter for mentors to find mentees and for mentees to search for mentors. Mentoring is such an essential part of growing our community. So if you're not mentoring anyone today, I can only ask, why not? Here's Tanya's take on mentoring and her advice on how to get involved with Mentoring Monday.

0:53Tanya JancaWell, since I started in InfoSec, I started with a professional mentor, and then eventually I kind of graduated his mentorship and then moved on to— that's part of how I met Nicole and why we started the project, is she's taught me so much. And as I've continued to progress my career, I keep having more and more mentors that Quite frankly, like, just all of them astound me that they would give me the time of day. And then I've been mentoring other people. And as I've started getting more followers on Twitter and such, I had people ask me if I would be their mentor. But I already mentor some people, and I realized if I took on more, I wouldn't have any time for them, and I would be an even more absentee mentor than I already feel like I am. And that would not work. So I still wanted to help them though. So I started this hashtag, #MentoringMonday. So as you might imagine, it happens on Mondays. Every Monday, I just tweet, you know, it's Mentoring Monday. Are you looking for a mentor? Are you willing to share the information that you have and, you know, teach someone and help them blossom? Just respond, use the hashtag and say if you're offering or asking or both and what topics. Most people for some reason forget to use the hashtag. And although I get that if they're responding to my tweet, that I get why they might forget to use it, but people are searching the hashtag each month, each week, and responding to the people directly because not everyone wants to, you know, offer publicly. Some people have told me when they say, oh, I'm willing to offer in this, they get 20 responses and they're overwhelmed. So instead what they're doing is like, answering people really directly who have requested a specific thing and they think they'll be a good fit. So using the hashtag is really important. And then, yeah, people have been naturally pairing themselves up. It's been so magical. People have been telling me all sorts of wonderful little stories of like, now I have 2 mentors, or, you know, this person introduced me to someone really important and then I ended up getting a job because of it, or I'm reading all these books thanks to the people you introduced me to. But really it's the community coming forward, right? A lot of people feel like they might not know enough to mentor someone. I just, person after person tells me like, oh, I, you know, I don't have enough experience. I'm like, how long have you worked in, you know, a SOC or whatever it is you're doing? And they'll say 10 years. I'm like, trust me, you know a ton. There are so many people that wish they knew, you know, 1/10 of what you know. I feel that if you have been doing your job for 2 years or more, that you likely know enough that you could mentor someone else. And people that are more senior in our community, in my opinion, should— I would like it if they would consider mentoring someone. How about that? We won't have any new senior people if there's never any junior people, right? Or we won't having to go from junior to intermediate without a mentor, it takes so much longer. Like, I feel I've done so well in InfoSec specifically because I've had these amazing people advocating for me, teaching me, helping me, making really key introductions for me. And, you know, without these people kind of pushing me forward, I wouldn't be where I am today. So if we want to have more senior people, which we do, I feel like a lot of us need to pitch in, and so far the community has been really wonderful. I really encourage people on Mondays or whenever, just search the hashtag #MentoringMonday and respond to people, even if it's just to suggest like, this is the best book I've ever read on this topic. You know, here's a link to it in case you want to just start by reading a book.

4:53Chris RomeoWe hope you enjoyed this first installment of 5 Minute AppSec, and you can tune in in the next couple days to hear the full interview with Tanya Janca and Nancy Guerresche about DevSlop.