In a recent post, I suggested that you sidestep the IT-outsourcing guillotine by making a lateral move to a new career as a patent agent. Bear with me – I've got another harebrained idea for you this time.

It seems that more and more firms – including such well-known companies as Facebook, Google, and Mozilla – are hiring hackers to breach their data-security defenses. This sort of “we dare you to find a vulnerability” testing may be initiated at any time, though it is typically employed upon soon-to-be-released versions of new applications. The sponsoring companies pay the hackers a per-penetration bounty for their work, and the hackers promise to report their exploits to no one except the companies. This gives the sponsoring firms an opportunity to shield vulnerabilities before rolling out their new systems.

This practice has become so widespread that it has spawned an industry of hackers (erm...now they call themselves “security consultants”) who offer their services under the rubric “penetration testing.” The job outlook for penetration-testing engineers is good – you can't say that for the rest of our field.

It looks to me like a pretty good job. You get to work on cutting-edge systems and you are successful in proportion to the sharpness of your wits. What more could you want from your career?

Web recommendation: Consider this sentence a kind of Rorschach test: If you are an ASP.NET programmer, you can think of node.js as being like an IHttpHandler written in JavaScript. If this is the kind of writing that makes you sit up and take notice, then check out Computer Zen, the blog of a remarkable programmer named Scott Hanselman. It's packed with well-explained working code samples and peppered with worthwhile insights. Good stuff. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.