Pros
- Great benefits with no waiting period - RRSP matching after only 3 months - No rotating shifts - They hire newbies in the industry - Thorough training and an extensive collection of knowledge base articles - Exposure to a variety of cybersecurity tools and resources - Plenty of opportunity to work voluntary overtime if you want to make some extra money - Great work/life balance, i.e. once your shift is over you don't have to think about work again until the next shift - Plans for a quarterly review process to allow for more frequent salary adjustments, but I haven't seen this in action yet
Cons
- Event monitoring gets extremely repetitive and tedious - Evening, weekend, and holidays shifts, which is to be expected in a SOC, but it adds to the negative feelings about the job. I don't expect to ever be able to take time off around Christmas, for example - Absolutely no downtime during a SOC shift, so it gets exhausting really quickly - Not enough staff so the volume of work is overwhelming (see above: no downtime) - Can feel isolating; outside of training, there's basically zero interaction with coworkers unless you're asking for help - While the actual training is great, there's no clear training plan; if you work a less popular shift, you can get left out of training sessions that are held during more popular hours, and then you lag behind others who joined at the same time or after you - Lack of communication regarding standard operating procedures, e.g. I didn't find out about the SOC schedule until months after starting. Now that I'm aware of it and follow it, I've noticed many people who don't follow it and likely have never been told about it - Only a 30 minute lunch break; doesn't seem like a big deal, but for a large corporate organization, this was surprising to me