Overview
I’ve been thinking a lot about infosec leadership, so I’ve decided to start writing about it. Various articles and such will appear here…
Name
The name for this is the same as the name of the Slack room that I share with my managers, it’s taken from a John LeCarré novel called Call for the Dead
As long as you were reasonably sober and minded your own busi ness no one gave twopence what you wore, did or said, or whom you brought with you.
10DEC2020: Hoarding findings
I was just talking with Josselin Feist about this, but one thing I’ve noticed is that people tend to hoard findings; they wait until the last day to put things in, they want to perform root cause analysis on everything, have to make things perfect, but this can also elide people who… aren’t doing much work
so if you want to approach your subordinates about it, one thing I’ve done is just to say
hey, I know sometimes the impulse is there to hold your findings until the very end, but it’s actually better for the team if you run your thoughts up the flag pole once you’ve done some initial work
just check in on folks, esp new folks
hey, wanted to see what’s going on with your project, does everything make sense, are there any things you’re seeing that you’re not sure about but haven’t really thought might be findings?
you’ll be able to tell after a while when folks are hoarding versus when folks are just not doing things
like I had a newer teaem member didn’t really have much of anything reported, and when I spoke to her she was sitting on 7-8 findings, but she didn’t really know how to approach them; even some more senior folks have sat on like 6 code bugs in projects
contrast that with other folks who are no longer with us; when I’d ask what they’re doing you get the “oh I’m researching” “oh I’m doing recon…”
it becomes clear who is working and who isn’t real fast, and a lot of what we do as managers is to meta-analyze folks who are doing the work we would do