Ranjitha Manjunath

I attribute my success to passion and loving what I do. When I started my undergrad, I thought I would be a different kind of engineer, but life took me in a different direction. The minute I finished my master's, I knew that I would be a cybersecurity engineer for my entire life because that's my passion, and I grew towards this job. Whichever company I work in, wherever I work, I just feel very passionate about it because I love what I'm doing. That passion is what drove me to be here till now. It's just that if you love what you do, then you can succeed in that. My mom, who was an entrepreneur, told me not to push myself too much on something I don't actually want to do, because then I would be regretting every single morning logging into my laptop. That advice really stuck with me.

The best career advice I ever received was from my previous manager at RMS when he was leaving the company. He told me to never sleep in my career, and that hit me hard. It's always about evolution and growth, doing courses, and always looking out for doing more and not settling for whatever we're doing as being enough. That advice makes me think even today - is what I'm doing from last year to this year enough? Is there any progress in my professional journey for myself? That's why I keep thinking every quarter about how to build my skills and grow in my career.

This field is basically about having confidence in the work we are doing. It's an everyday evolution field, and it doesn't matter who is leading it, women or men. Having a voice in something so important to an organization, which is crucial for everyday activity - I feel all women should step in to learn more. There is nothing like women-friendly or man-friendly in this field. I'm starting to see more women getting into the cybersecurity field, and now I'm trying to meet more women who are trying to get into security. This is a great start to wherever they're starting their career. Cybersecurity is the field to go into because it's booming every day, and it's never going to stop.

One of the biggest challenges is the reorganizations in companies, which make your position very uncomfortable. You have to start proving yourself again to the new leadership, which feels like starting your career all over again in a company. The second challenge is that many big tech companies are creating positions that combine software engineer plus security, which means they want a software engineer who is okay and well-known but not completely skilled in cybersecurity. This puts me a bit off because a cybersecurity engineer can code and program - they are trained and have experience in all of that. But when a position says a security engineer should be a software engineer, and they make you go through all the levels of interview rounds for a software engineer rather than a security engineer, that's challenging and not according to security standards. There's so much more for a security interview or security engineer to answer on their side. I feel it should be focused on just the cybersecurity field, and they can interview for programming or coding, but not like a software engineer.

Respect is the most important value to me - having respect towards one another in an office environment or between colleagues. It doesn't matter what role you're playing, if you are a junior or a senior, because everybody has a different set of knowledge. Hearing out and listening to the problem and being valued as one of the members of the company is always great. Appreciation at the end is also crucial. Everybody needs to hear after 10 hours or 12 hours of a day that the work you did was actually good. Of course, it would be a team effort, and appreciation and collaboration are essential.