Why I Quit Development to Break Into Cybersecurity

I started at the terminal with my fingers frozen, time ticking–tic-tic-tic–less than 5 minutes left for my very first Capture The Flag (CTF) challenge, and I had no idea what to do. This was uncharted territory—a silent challenge which seemed like it was screaming at me asking: ‘Do you have what it takes to exploit this vulnerability? That’s when it hit me: I didn’t just want to build apps anymore. I wanted to break them—and maybe defend them.

But, how did I get here? To know please read into my journey of how a developer with a safe career decided to risk everything to find his passion in cybersecurity.

This dates back to the time of my graduation where akin to many other students, I, too, was standing in a corridor of uncertainty. In the final semester of my undergraduate studies, like every other guy in the field, I too was doing the same routine development tasks. Well, not my fault—that’s all I knew—that’s all my friends, seniors, and juniors knew. Hell, that’s all everyone seemed to know.

And suddenly, someone who always wanted to be different from the crowd, ahead of the curve, found himself amidst it. And the funniest part was that in these 4 years, I had learnt about 56 different subjects ranging from various domains from physical devices to cloud and yet, at the end of it, all I was doing was building the same cookie-cutter websites, duct-taped together with boilerplate code and AI tools.

Prior to this sem, I was pretty complacent with myself as doing development got me easy money. The easy paychecks were like a drug to me, kept me hooked, kept me working, kept me happy but it all changed on One chilly day, when my batchmates lounged in the sun while debating career paths. "Full-stack," "AI," "blockchain"—the same buzzwords echoed until one friend described his cybersecurity project. I didn’t understand the technical details, but the way he talked about breaking and defending systems lit a fuse in my brain.

I thought, wait, I too should have projects of that sort. Intrinsically rummaging through my mind in hopes of discovering a nice unique project, something different, something awesome but I couldn't strain it out of my mind. Suddenly, the guy who has been unbeaten in 11 hackathons seemed like a regular running behind paychecks.

His project did sound exciting, interesting and everyone looked at him in awe. I had nothing of that sort. That night, after coming back from college, I threw my backpack on the floor, took out a packet of chips and let myself fall down the Google rabbit hole and what I discovered split my life into Before CTF and After CTF.

Well, we shall go deep into CTFs, my journey and how I improved on it later but, for now, long story short, I sucked. It was a new territory much like a new game for me, one at which I sucked big time. Yes, that's what the start of this blog referred to. But, yeah it was fun, it was exciting, In fact, I’d go as far as calling it therapeutic for someone like me who had always found long hours of development (much more of copy pasting) draining.

I messaged that friend, binged THM rooms and sacrificed sleep to long hours of youtube tutorials. Then, as I was approaching the end of my undergrad exams, luck intervened: Vairav Technology, a top-tier cybersecurity company in Nepal, launched a SOC Mentorship Program. I applied, terrified but certain that this was my shot.

And as Morgan Housel wrote in The Psychology of Money:

I’d taken the risk of abandoning a “safe” career in development and Guess what? Luck handed me an opportunity in the form of Vairav's SOC Mentorship which guided my career into this field.

For Anyone Standing at the Edge
If you’re reading this, hesitating then please remember:

1. Excitement > Stability – If cybersecurity makes your brain buzz, run toward it.
2. Start Small – A single TryHackMe room or CTF can change your trajectory.
3. Find the right people, right community– I wouldn’t be here without my amazing friends and mentors. Now, I’m paying it forward.
4. And for the ones who haven’t explored the field yet, I’d say: give it a try, mate.

Lets connect:

• Linkedin
• Github