Nelson Saenz

I started in help desk. Most of us did. There's no shame in it and I'm here to tell you why so you can reframe your thinking if you are in that role and are feeling kind of down about it. You start out in help desk for a few reasons. 1. To learn how to think critically and solve someone else's computer issues without those same issues happening to you. 2. To maintain your temperament and patience when you encounter the same situation over and over without losing your cool so that went a real emergency occurs you are mentally and physically prepared to tackle it head-on. 3. To learn the most common issues your particular org faces and help your coworkers also learn them so that they can be resolved more quickly in the future. 4. And most importantly to learn how people in your org communicate the org's problems in their own language unique to the org. Darcy in Procurement calls the help desk everyday. Some days it feels like Darcy resets every night when she goes to sleep because she cannot retain any information you have tried to teach her. Darcy is a colossal pain in the ass. Even your boss agrees with that. And no matter how many times you tell your boss that Darcy needs to be retrained, no one ever actually retrains her. You don't like dealing with Darcy or other users like her and it really makes your job seem pointless at times but here is the difference between you and Darcy. Darcy will always be in Procurement. Darcy will always be stuck at the starting line. Darcy is never going to learn how to set up a virtual environment or vibe code with AI and solve one-off problems because people like Darcy are wholly dependent on people like you. Without you people like Darcy cannot function at work. But it is because of people like Darcy that you're going to eventually get out of the help desk and when you do take on a role like threat detection you're going to be able to advise the executive staff on not only external threats but internal threats like Darcy. Darcy is not malicious and doesn't want to hurt anyone but because of her incompetence and inability to grow professionally, her inexperience and sometimes ineptitude, puts the org at extreme risk of compromise. You know this because you have dealt with Darcy hundreds of times and so every time you went to your boss and told them that Darcy just doesn't want to learn or does not have the capacity to learn you learned to spot a potential threat. You're not going to click that phishing link but Darcy likely will. You're not going to allow a stranger to tailgate behind you into the building which requires card access but Darcy likely will. And you're certainly not going to give out sensitive information over the phone to a stranger but Darcy will give that information six ways to Sunday. You will never do any of these things because Darcy is the reason you know why not to do them. It is because of her and those like her that have prepared you for the challenges of today and tomorrow. They come naturally to you now whereas in the beginning you felt out of your element and unprepared, and sometimes maybe a little scared that you couldn't do it. But you did do it. You're here today. You've grown professionally. Many of you who started out barely understanding a computer can hack it today. You couldn't then but you can now because Darcy showed you the way. Every time you had to think of a quicker way to solve her problem you learned how not to do the same thing that Darcy was doing but also how to take shortcuts which in essence is the basis of hacking and by extension threat detection. All the uncertainty and confusion in the past has led you to this moment. Seize it, for you have earned the right to do so.