Here’s the short version: I’m 57, spent over three decades as a Creative Director in advertising, and I’m now studying to become a SOC Analyst. I didn’t plan this. It happened because I got fired.
In the ’80s, I had a Commodore 64, a 1541 (introduced me to the practice of being humble and patient), a TRS-80 Acoustic Coupler. If you know, you know. If you don’t: that machine was a portal — not to the internet, which wasn’t really a thing yet, but to something that felt like it. It was called Datex-P in Germany and I knew how to use it for free. The underlying logic of how things work. I wasn’t playing games, mostly. I was taking them apart. Poking at memory addresses, watching what broke, figuring out where the seams were.
That’s what I was at 16: a hacker. Not in the Hollywood sense. In the actual sense. Someone obsessed with understanding systems from the inside out.
Then came creative school, a career in advertising, thirty-odd years of making things that sold other things. Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, FFM, the circuit. I was good at it — finding the human truth in a brief, building something that actually connected with people. Different problem-solving, but still problem-solving.
The itch was there, underneath everything. Whenever a major breach made the news, whenever I read about a red team that walked out of a datacenter with a visitor badge and a USB drive, I leaned forward instead of scrolling past.
I just didn’t act on it. Not yet.
Then I went back to an agency I’d already worked at once before. I knew it was bad the first time. Went back anyway because the money was right.
Here’s the thing about bad places: they don’t improve. Shit stays shit.
So when they kicked me out, I didn’t grieve the job — I’d long stopped caring about it. What I grieved was the time. The years of deferring the thing I actually wanted to do because the thing I was doing paid well enough to keep deferring.
Standing on the wrong side of a closed door at an agency I never should have gone back to: that, in retrospect, was the best thing that could have happened.
I enrolled at Masterschool Institute of Technology. Started working through TryHackMe. Got deep into the SOC Level 1 path — network fundamentals, log analysis, incident detection, SIEM, digital forensics basics. The kind of work where you’re the person watching for the thing everyone else has already moved past. And en route to become a RedTeamer again — next station after SAL1 cert? Jr Pentester Path. PT1 cert, here I come!
It’s not easy to start over. I’m not going to pretend it is. There are days when something that should click doesn’t, and you have to just sit with that. The knowledge isn’t wasted — 30 years of understanding how organizations work, how decisions get made, how threat actors (not so different from bad clients, honestly) think and move — but the technical reps have to be earned from scratch. No shortcut for that.
The C64 kid is still in there. Still taking things apart. Just with better tools.
Turns out I was always a hacker. I just spent 30 years with a different job title — I exploited consumer behaviour, bypassing gatekeepers, escalating privileges, and sliding proofs of concept straight to clients when bosses said, “We can’t do that.” My answer was usually, “Watch me.”
I write and operate under the handle 0x8R4INR07. It’s not subtle. It’s not supposed to be, because that’s what working in the ad industry felt like more and more everyday: brainrot.
This is the comeback I didn’t plan for but clearly needed. Career pivot, late-stage restart, whatever you want to call it. I call it: finally doing the thing.
If you got fired from somewhere you shouldn’t have gone back to — or if you’re still there, telling yourself the money makes it worth it — here’s what I’d tell you: maybe nothing was wasted. Maybe you were just compiling.
#careerchange #evolving #comeback #cybersecurity
