Monika Malik, lead data/AI software engineer at AT&T, doesn’t hold back on why functional leaders may be looking to defect. Too often, they are held accountable for projects, yet not given autonomy to make roadmap, staffing, and budget decisions, she says.
“Security leaders experience burnout when they own the risk and have no roadmap,’’ Malik says. On top of that, there is chronic stress and “breach panic, pager fatigue, and breach aftermath dumpster fires, [which] lead to burnout quicker than compensation can mitigate,’’ Malik says.
Fisher agrees: “This immense pressure is compounded by a lack of control. A security leader is often the scapegoat for failures originating elsewhere in the organization — a single clicked link by a user, a vulnerability pushed by a development team, or a poor decision by a high-level executive.”
