Identifying gaps, putting together projects to address them, soliciting sponsorship for those projects, and reporting up status and milestones.
Maintaining relationships with stakeholders and partners, beating off vendors with a stick, maintaining team morale, coaching, hiring.
Trying to keep the administrative overhead to a minimum so my team can actually do work... opening changes, dog and pony shows for change advisory boards, documentation, providing info for audit requests, answering questions from leadership, etc.
Keeping up technical skills so I don't become a paper pusher, and I keep my teams respect.
Yup that about sums it up. Also communicating repetitively how every “hack” that a C-Level sees in the news doesn’t really impact us. “Hey have you heard about (whatever attack is in the news today), should we be worried??”.
"beating off vendors with a stick"....this is way to accurate. Can't tell you how many emails I get that start with "I hope you can excuse my professional persistence"
I remember doing a lot of this when I was a team lead for a help desk. Started my journey in security a year ago and glad to see it’s something similar. As a leader how do you keep up with your knowledge?
Not knowing how things work bothers me, so feeding that obsession keeps my skillset relevant. I see so many people in management (and even senior technical roles) lose that spark. Stay curious, it pays dividens.
I was a VP but I quit a few years back as I hate management, it has almost nothing to do with what made me interested in a technology career.
It's no different from any other managerial role in any other department.
You're primarily dealing with staff problems, head count and personnel and budget/rfp/rfq.
Basically doing tasks to enable your staff to optimally perform, there's nothing much to do with actual security other than having a grasp of issues your staff deal with.
Not a manager but as with most managerial roles, ideally you are managing people doing what you did, and helping them to succeed. This means Watching their backs in the meetings you attend that they don’t, the tickets you get sent that they don’t, linning up projects for them to work on and holding them accountable. A deep technical understanding and ability to be the top player on the team you are managing are hugely helpful. A lot of time is taken up on a quarterly scope by prepping quarterly business reports, and quarterly planning. More travel than your engineers, more presentations both giving and watching.
My top skill that gives good managers the edge over decent, typical managers is being technical enough to ask the right questions at the right times (harder than it sounds, maybe you get 10 minutes to look over a design doc someone spent 2 weeks making, and you need to identify where the plan is a bit weak, where you think your reports can ruse to the challenge..)
Currently a senior manager at a financial services firm that I oversee a team of 8. It's a mix-up of technical and non-technical work that I do as some of the other Redditors have mentioned. Some of the day-to-day responsibilities include firefighting on escalations, strategy & planning, and endless meetings for projects. But surprisingly I still keep up with the technical through system threat modeling. If you were to ask me on whether I would still continue to be in this role for the next 5 years, I'd still be manager.
Day to day theses days mostly consis of assisting teams meetings one after another with no time left to do any actual work. We end a meeting because another one already started.
I only have a two-man team, so I mainly handle contact with other IT arms for patching and continuous improvement. I also run vulnerability management and end-user training. My direct report handles some of the backend stuff when it comes to our EDR solution and SIEM. I also meet with management to give status reports on the trends we see and what we do every week. I'm also in charge of IAM and policy creation, so that's always fun too.
This is amazing that you do all this (in a good way). I've been on teams where it's 1 security team member to over 300 employees in the org. Not that the ratio equals more work, but feels that way sometimes.
Yeah, our footprint is smaller in terms of users, but our infrastructure is robust. I work with Intelligent Transportation Systems, which involves many servers and networking equipment.
Customer Due Diligence Questionnaires are the bane of my existence.
Inter office politics is a breeze, everyone complains, sure. But once you know who to pull into convos and how to frame business requirements, it becomes easy to push initiatives.
Managing RMF compliance efforts for the different programs within the organization, responding to questions from different functional area’s, delegating short-suspense tasks, regular sync-ups with external stakeholders, regular sync-ups with my functional lead, reporting status updates to higher level management, regular reviewing of system scan reports, tracking of plans of action and milestones, providing advice and coaching for my team, whenever it may be needed.
Just normal “manager” stuff.
It’s sad how the higher up you go, the less technical your role/contributions become, but someone has to lead and lead without toxicity, and that’s hard to come by these days, so I just do the best I can.
Translating information from technical to manager language is the most time consuming activity aside from training staff on their job. Day to day, I plan and coordinate what is needed to keep cyber security operations on track and responding to incidents as they come.
Identifying gaps, putting together projects to address them, soliciting sponsorship for those projects, and reporting up status and milestones. Maintaining relationships with stakeholders and partners, beating off vendors with a stick, maintaining team morale, coaching, hiring. Trying to keep the administrative overhead to a minimum so my team can actually do work... opening changes, dog and pony shows for change advisory boards, documentation, providing info for audit requests, answering questions from leadership, etc. Keeping up technical skills so I don't become a paper pusher, and I keep my teams respect.
Yup that about sums it up. Also communicating repetitively how every “hack” that a C-Level sees in the news doesn’t really impact us. “Hey have you heard about (whatever attack is in the news today), should we be worried??”.
“Yes you should be worried” *money keeps flowing in to department*
sounds like a good manager, where do i apply?
"beating off vendors with a stick"....this is way to accurate. Can't tell you how many emails I get that start with "I hope you can excuse my professional persistence"
I'm stealing that!
I remember doing a lot of this when I was a team lead for a help desk. Started my journey in security a year ago and glad to see it’s something similar. As a leader how do you keep up with your knowledge?
Not knowing how things work bothers me, so feeding that obsession keeps my skillset relevant. I see so many people in management (and even senior technical roles) lose that spark. Stay curious, it pays dividens.
Similar vibes over here! I find times where I have to be boots on the ground as well being a team of 3.
As I told someone this week "the technical bits are easy, the hard part is getting people to do their jobs"
I was a VP but I quit a few years back as I hate management, it has almost nothing to do with what made me interested in a technology career. It's no different from any other managerial role in any other department. You're primarily dealing with staff problems, head count and personnel and budget/rfp/rfq. Basically doing tasks to enable your staff to optimally perform, there's nothing much to do with actual security other than having a grasp of issues your staff deal with.
Sounds about right. VP positions are focused moreso on the overall business than the technical subject matter
I'm feeling that, to the point of thinking about changing careers. Can't stand doing PowerPoints and spreadsheets all day long
Being popular and likable so my team is able to get shit done because I’ve built a good relationship with my peers.
Not a manager but as with most managerial roles, ideally you are managing people doing what you did, and helping them to succeed. This means Watching their backs in the meetings you attend that they don’t, the tickets you get sent that they don’t, linning up projects for them to work on and holding them accountable. A deep technical understanding and ability to be the top player on the team you are managing are hugely helpful. A lot of time is taken up on a quarterly scope by prepping quarterly business reports, and quarterly planning. More travel than your engineers, more presentations both giving and watching. My top skill that gives good managers the edge over decent, typical managers is being technical enough to ask the right questions at the right times (harder than it sounds, maybe you get 10 minutes to look over a design doc someone spent 2 weeks making, and you need to identify where the plan is a bit weak, where you think your reports can ruse to the challenge..)
Begging for budget.
Currently a senior manager at a financial services firm that I oversee a team of 8. It's a mix-up of technical and non-technical work that I do as some of the other Redditors have mentioned. Some of the day-to-day responsibilities include firefighting on escalations, strategy & planning, and endless meetings for projects. But surprisingly I still keep up with the technical through system threat modeling. If you were to ask me on whether I would still continue to be in this role for the next 5 years, I'd still be manager.
Day to day theses days mostly consis of assisting teams meetings one after another with no time left to do any actual work. We end a meeting because another one already started.
I only have a two-man team, so I mainly handle contact with other IT arms for patching and continuous improvement. I also run vulnerability management and end-user training. My direct report handles some of the backend stuff when it comes to our EDR solution and SIEM. I also meet with management to give status reports on the trends we see and what we do every week. I'm also in charge of IAM and policy creation, so that's always fun too.
This is amazing that you do all this (in a good way). I've been on teams where it's 1 security team member to over 300 employees in the org. Not that the ratio equals more work, but feels that way sometimes.
Yeah, our footprint is smaller in terms of users, but our infrastructure is robust. I work with Intelligent Transportation Systems, which involves many servers and networking equipment.
I probably spend the most time trying to get people to not message my boss (the former CISO)
Customer Due Diligence Questionnaires are the bane of my existence. Inter office politics is a breeze, everyone complains, sure. But once you know who to pull into convos and how to frame business requirements, it becomes easy to push initiatives.
Convincing owners and presidents they’ve had their heads up their own ass for the past five years.
Managing RMF compliance efforts for the different programs within the organization, responding to questions from different functional area’s, delegating short-suspense tasks, regular sync-ups with external stakeholders, regular sync-ups with my functional lead, reporting status updates to higher level management, regular reviewing of system scan reports, tracking of plans of action and milestones, providing advice and coaching for my team, whenever it may be needed. Just normal “manager” stuff. It’s sad how the higher up you go, the less technical your role/contributions become, but someone has to lead and lead without toxicity, and that’s hard to come by these days, so I just do the best I can.
Translating information from technical to manager language is the most time consuming activity aside from training staff on their job. Day to day, I plan and coordinate what is needed to keep cyber security operations on track and responding to incidents as they come.
You're going to get 500 different answers to this. Everyone's day is different because every org is different as is the makeup of the security team.