ihatestylometry

He tells us that he "was working on a sandbox to brush up [his] Linux kernel programming skills". I don't deny that he has to prove himself, but there's definitely potential. And I didn't mean that he will get paid like security professionals, he could even just search for an unpaid internship to get his foot in the door. - No unwarranted exception, but I can see what you mean.

I wholeheartedly agree! And you put it way better than me.

Maybe we're missing something here, but I got the impression that this is an incredible time for talented people. I've learned all about hacking online - kernel hacking, remote exploits, DEP/ASLR bypass techniques, Kali Linux for penetration testing, exploit-db.com and Metasploit for inspiration, the great tutorials of corelan.be and other great minds and so much more - it's all there, readily available for free.

You don't even need a big budget to build a controlled environment - Raspberry Pi's, maybe some cheap routers and computers and you're ready to go.

It's just sad to see that he's already so negative about his options. My comment wasn't about how old one has to be to justify his negativism, I'm sorry if it came across as such. I can relate to his feelings and it makes me sad, this is all I meant with this sentence.

The education system prioritizes that all students have a baseline knowledge above all else. It's not the goal to incentivize high achievers using a hard scoring system, because this'll prevent the success of others who aren't good in educational settings - and there is a group of people who are incredible programmers, but lack the skills to get good grades.

If you're really good, you have remarkably good grades and do interesting projects in your spare time. w.r.t. your understanding of unfair: Don't compare yourself to fellow students, because they are by definition average. If you want to profit from your advantage: do stuff, get connected with great minds, build projects. This will get you years ahead of your fellow students who are busy passing the exams. What about this incredibly unfair advantage? ;)

He's way too young for this attitude. I've hacked things in my teenage years too and was obsessed with hacking for many years before I started to do freelance work - the feeling of being superior is a common problem for all types of skills if you're young, no matter what, so he definitely shares wisdom with his last paragraphs.

But I don't think the problem is not that society has problems finding interesting challenges for highly skilled young people like him. It's unfortunate his school doesn't have hackathons and other activities, but he's not dependent on such circumstances. I think his problem is that he doesn't recognize that he's in full control of his life.

I've talked with several security researchers who hack IoT gadgets and other things for a living - they write their own ROP chains, hack web applications and test software for airlines with very high security standards - and they told me that they take every talent they can get. They're getting 4 to 5-digit daily rates for penetration test gigs and are well-respected. So there's demand and there are great people who want to share their knowledge.

So my question: Instead of hacking printers, why not talk to companies who are searching for his talent?

I'm not defending the current state of CS education, it's really bad and decoupled from reality, but it's no excuse for gifted people to give up and justify blackhat hacking - which is just another word for being criminal.

Edit: Absolutely agree on the click-baity title!