Identity Engineer

PowerShell ships with Windows; bash ships with macOS and Linux. You already have everything you need.

1. 1

   Pick a real chore

   Not a toy problem — something that genuinely annoys you. Sorting a Downloads folder full of four hundred files. Renaming photos to a consistent format. Finding every file over 500MB. It has to be real, or the payoff at the end will not land.

2. 2

   Do it by hand once, and time it

   Actually time it. Write the number down. This is the figure you are going to beat, and it is also how you will one day justify automation work to a manager who wants to know why it is worth your afternoon.

3. 3

   Make a copy to work on

   Duplicate the folder. Everything from here runs against the copy. This is not caution for beginners — it is what people do professionally, because the cost of being wrong is asymmetric.

   Windows

   Copy-Item -Path .\Downloads -Destination .\Downloads-copy -Recurse

   macOS

   cp -R ~/Downloads ~/Downloads-copy

   Linux

   cp -R ~/Downloads ~/Downloads-copy

4. 4

   Ask what it WOULD do, before it does anything

   Run the operation in preview mode first. Nothing changes; it just tells you what it intends. Read that output properly. This habit is the single biggest difference between someone safe to give automation to and someone who is not.

   Windows

   Get-ChildItem .\Downloads-copy -File | Group-Object Extension | Format-Table Name, Count

   macOS

   find ~/Downloads-copy -type f | sed "s/.*\.//" | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

   Linux

   find ~/Downloads-copy -type f | sed "s/.*\.//" | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

5. 5

   Now let it run

   Sort every file into a folder named after its extension. Five lines or so. It will not work first time — read the error, change one thing, run it again. That loop, repeated, is the actual job.

   Windows

   Get-ChildItem .\Downloads-copy -File | ForEach-Object { $d = ".\Downloads-copy\" + $_.Extension.TrimStart("."); New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path $d | Out-Null; Move-Item $_.FullName $d }

   macOS

   cd ~/Downloads-copy && for f in *.*; do d="${f##*.}"; mkdir -p "$d"; mv "$f" "$d"/; done

   Linux

   cd ~/Downloads-copy && for f in *.*; do d="${f##*.}"; mkdir -p "$d"; mv "$f" "$d"/; done

6. 6

   Compare it to your number

   You wrote down how long it took by hand. It now takes under a second, and it will take under a second every time from now on. Sit with that for a moment — that gap, multiplied across an organisation, is the entire economic argument for automation as a career.

Needs one other person who is not technical, and a real problem they actually have. That is the only requirement, and it is the hard part.

1. 1

   Find a real complaint

   Ask a family member, housemate or friend what annoys them about their computer or phone. Do not accept a technical description — you want the raw version. "It's slow." "The printer never works." "It keeps logging me out." That vagueness is the actual starting condition of the job.

2. 2

   Resist fixing it for ten minutes

   This is the discipline the whole trial is built around. Ask questions instead. When did it start? What changed around then? Does it happen every time, or sometimes? Show me. Watch them do it — you will almost always see something they did not mention, because they did not know it mattered.

3. 3

   Reproduce it yourself

   Make the problem happen on demand, with your own hands. If you cannot reproduce it, you cannot know you have fixed it — you can only know it has stopped happening for now, which is not the same thing and will come back.

4. 4

   Halve the problem, repeatedly

   Is it that app or all apps? That network or all networks? That account or all accounts? Each answer eliminates half of what it could be. Keep going until only one thing is left. Notice how few questions this actually takes when you choose them well.

5. 5

   Fix it — then explain it without jargon

   Make the fix. Then tell them what was wrong in language they understand, without being condescending and without pretending it was harder than it was. Watch their face. This skill is worth more to an early IT career than any certification, and almost nobody practises it deliberately.

6. 6

   Write the runbook

   Five lines: the symptom, how to confirm it is this and not something else, the fix, and how to tell it worked. Written so someone else could follow it at 3am without ringing you. This is the artefact that turns a fix into an asset.

Uses the account settings pages you already have. Nothing to install. You will likely also improve your own security materially, which is a decent side effect.

1. 1

   Find the account that owns all the others

   Start at your main email. Now list every service that would send a password reset there. That is not a list of accounts — it is a list of things someone gets for free the moment they take that one. Security people call this blast radius, and it is the single most useful concept in identity work.

2. 2

   Check what is actually guarding it

   Look at the security settings of that email account. Is there a second factor? Is it SMS — which is interceptable — or an app or hardware key? Now check the recovery options: an old phone number or a disused backup address is a back door that bypasses everything else you just checked.

3. 3

   Review what you have handed out

   Find the third-party access page on your Google, Microsoft or Apple account — the list of apps you signed in to using it. Most people have twenty to eighty entries and recognise perhaps half. Read what each was granted. Some will have read access to your entire mailbox from a service you used once in 2019.

   Any

   Google:    myaccount.google.com/permissions

   Any

   Microsoft: account.microsoft.com/privacy → apps and services

   Any

   Apple:     appleid.apple.com → Sign in with Apple

4. 4

   Revoke, and notice how that feels

   Remove everything you do not currently use. Notice the hesitation — "what if something breaks?" That exact hesitation, multiplied across ten thousand employees and twenty years, is why organisations accumulate permissions nobody dares remove. You are feeling the central problem of identity engineering firsthand.

5. 5

   Check the sessions still open

   Most services list active sessions and signed-in devices. Look for a device you no longer own or a location you do not recognise. Sign them all out. Note how many services do not offer this at all — that absence is itself a finding.

6. 6

   Write the one-page assessment

   What is your most valuable account? What is the weakest path into it — is it the password, the second factor, the recovery method, or an app you granted access to years ago? What would you fix first if you had one hour? That prioritised write-up is exactly the deliverable an identity or GRC role produces, and doing it for yourself is the cheapest possible practice.