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Lately on twitter, I’ve been seeing accounts of quite attractive young women, who are network engineers or security specialist or similar. Most of them have somewhat high following counts in the +20k. There are a bunch of similarities between them. They often have pronounce in the bio and sell some sort of book or course on how to do, what they do. Looking at the technical content they put out, it seems like incredibly basic stuff, such as running a password cracker like Hydra or running WireShark. All their Github profiles are more or less empty with no contributions to speak of. They seem to do little or no code at all, but they all appear to have employment in tech companies of various sorts.
I have only ever had one course in security, so I don’t know much about the field, but it was almost exclusively writing exploits in Assembly and some C. We were only allowed to use some basic tools to hexdump a binary and such. I do realize that in the real world you would use all sorts of tools available to you, but still, I would expect somewhat heavier technical skills displayed.
So I’m sort of confused. What do they actually do in their jobs? They don’t seem to have skills that I thought were required for that type of work. Are they just DEI hires? Why do they have so many followers? Is it just tech guys simping over women? Is the algorithm pushing them for some reason? I basically never see any such men (or maybe it is just my stupid ass only noticing the attractive women).
Does someone here work in the field, who can enlighten me?
Some examples of the most prominent:
https://twitter.com/TracketPacer
https://twitter.com/notshenetworks
https://twitter.com/inversecos
https://twitter.com/cybersecmeg
Could this be explained along basic economic lines or trends?
Eg. (taking a stab at this, but likely other folk here are much better at it than me):
The skills and patterns for getting to the top of social media sites are now well understood and cheap/easily bought (you can take effective courses that will train you). So we're starting to see an over-supply of attractive people who are good at engineering their way to the top of the algorithm for any given niche, and an under-supply of niches that are still lucrative.
These same attractive people are prospecting for new niches, and then zero-sum competing with each other for dominance of each given niche.
If this were true, I'd expect, in the short term, as these specific niches are being prospected, that a small fraction of the folk dominating each niche to have some legitimacy - they're folk who know their niche, and then picked up the social media dominance skills as secondary. The rest followed some other path, that led to them having a social media skills and now shopping around for which niche they can best exploit or dominate, or something along those lines.
In the longer term, as each niche becomes more and more extremely competitive, I'd expect the low value add folk to gradually get side lined or marginalized, and the folk who actually have something to contribute to start dominating. Likely through any of several methods - though I suspect actually having or gaining the skills and talent necessary to produce original content won't be one of them, since probably the best way to dominate a niche is to become an opinionated and effective aggregator as opposed to becoming an original content creator.
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