Ten years, how time flies.

Ten years, a decade, it’s a very long time, and yet passes in the blink of an eye.

I joined Tenable ten years ago, and somehow they have not tired of me yet. I had known Ron Gula and Jack Huffard for a few years before I joined, we had tried to find a fit for me at Tenable a few times before, but in 2011 Astaro was being acquired and we decided that there was a good fit for me as the first person to fill the role of product manager at Tenable.

In 2011 I joined a company of just over 120 people, big enough and mature enough to be stable and profitable, but small enough that it had the excitement of a startup. It was an amazing team, led by Ron, Jack, and Renaud, including Marcus Ranum, Paul Asadoorian, Carlos Perez, Jon Brody, and many more. Over the years the company evolved, the team was joined by Gavin Millard, Space Rogue, Jeff Man, and other friends who spent some time with us at Tenable. It has been great watching the career progression for all of those who remain at Tenable, and those whose career paths led them elsewhere.

Tenable today is much larger, it is a successful publicly traded company, and Tenable still has a great team, led for the past few years by Amit Yoran. There has been a lot of change, but there are still more than a few folks who have been at Tenable longer than I have. It is funny to think of someone as young as Renaud as one of the “old timers”, but that’s the tech world.

While my role at Tenable has evolved continuously since then, Tenable has always supported my community engagement efforts, and they have always been supportive of me. Life has presented me with a few challenges over the years; Tenable’s support, and especially the support of Ron and Jack in the early days, and Amit, Dave Cole, and Gavin more recently, has been nothing short of amazing. I am eternally grateful for their support, individually and as an organization.

These days my role is community advocate, a role where I get to dedicate much of my time to working on a wide variety of projects including supporting Security BSides, continuing efforts to address stress and burnout in our communities, the Shoulders of InfoSec history project, and occasional career studies. It is truly a dream job.

What about the next ten years? I won’t pretend to know what lies ahead, but I am happy to be starting my second decade at Tenable this week.

(Note, my usual disclaimer applies here: I rarely speak *for* Tenable, and am not speaking on their behalf now, this is a personal post, but I will always *listen* for Tenable and pass feedback and comments along to the appropriate teams.)

Finally, the results of the employer support survey

 Delayed by holidays and the madness of the past month, but here it is.

First, the very short summary: most of us in the security realm are pretty lucky to be where we are during the pandemic. Most of us have employers who have been at least somewhat supportive and flexible as we deal with the pandemic and its impact on our lives.

Most, but not all, had positive things to report. Some have lost hours, taken pay cuts, or lost their jobs. Some work for inflexible orgs, some have had working conditions deteriorate.

A link to the sanitized full data set of 216 answers is at the end of this post. Here are some highlights:

Question 1: On a scale of 1-5, 5 being best, how well do you feel your company has supported employees' during the pandemic? 5: 40.3%

4: 34.7%

3: 16.2%

2: 5.1%

1: 3.7%

That's pretty solid, unless you are one of the 8 or 11 folks in the 1 or 2 category respectively.

Next:

On a scale of 1-5, 5 being best. how well do you feel your company has communicated with employees about the pandemic and the company's pandemic response?

5: 48.1%

4: 29.2%

3: 11.6%

2: 6.5%

1: 4.6%

Again, this one looks good for most, but not all, of us. I find this one especially promising, as internal communication is often a source of frustration in work. Maybe companies will learn from this. I'm not holding my breath, but maybe.

On a scale of 1-5, how well do you feel your company has been understanding and supportive of the personal and emotional impact of the pandemic on employees?

5: 44.4%

4: 23.6%

3: 16.7%

2: 8.3%

1: 6.9%

Once again, pretty good for most of us.

There is one area where improvement is needed, that is in training and supporting managers for effectively working with a remote workforce. Not terrible, but definitely room for improvement here:

On a scale of 1-5, how well do you feel your company has been understanding and supportive of the personal and emotional impact of the pandemic on employees?

5: 21.8%

4: 25.5%

3: 22.2%

2: 18.1%

1: 12.5%

Some of the comments reinforced the challenges with management skills during the pandemic.

And a handful of numbers picked from the other questions:

22.7% worked from home before, and still do, while 53.2% are working from home until their employer deems it safe to return.

60.2% have had some support for acquiring additional tech for working from home (sending equipment, funding purchases, etc.).

87.5% have worked through the pandemic without suffering pay or job loss.

The sanitized data set is available here if you want to dig into it yourself: https://1drv.ms/x/s!AjU9TlQrSzm4jp9_2l5Hp-XL3Vx7oA?e=wArIKa