Hackers have a wide variety of specific skills that are super valuable in a “white hat” environment.

If you’re interested in leaving the “dark side” or you simply want to reduce your risk profile as a hacker—these could be some interesting career paths you could pursue easily without needing to learn a whole new stack of skills.

Security Engineer

A security engineer is a “white-hat hacker”, i.e., an IT professional who analyzes computer systems and computer networks to ensure they are running securely. This involves proactive analysis and understanding of possible security threats and attack vectors and designing the system to minimize the exposure to these threats.

Question: How much does a Security Engineer in the US make per year?

The average annual income of a Security Engineer in the United States is between $75,732 and $144,874, with an average of $108,851 and a statistical median of $105,928 per year.

Learn More: I’ve compiled more information about this career path — income, industry trends, learning paths — in an in-depth guide on the Finxter blog here.

Network Engineer

A network engineer plans, supervises, debugs, installs, and implements computer networks. The required skill set of a network engineer includes a profound understanding of basic networking protocols such as TCP/IP and UDP, as well as basic hardware configurations such as Ethernet switches and routers.

The average annual income of a Network Engineer in the United States is between $68,000 and $104,000 with a median income of $87,000 per year according to multiple sources including Indeed, Glassdoor, and Talent.com.

Learn More: I’ve compiled more information about this career path — income, industry trends, learning paths — in an in-depth guide on the Finxter blog here.

Distributed Systems Developer

A distributed systems engineer designs, implements, and debugs distributed systems for data storage, crypto & web3, or analytics. The idea is to design a distributed system that can provide a service to users that couldn’t be provided by a centralized system (e.g., providing a decentralized, censorship-free monetary network).

How much does a Distributed Systems Engineer in the US make per year?

The average annual income of a Distributed Systems Engineer in the United States is between $97,000 and $169,656, with an average of $126,894 and a statistical median of $130,000 per year.

Learn More: I’ve compiled more information about this career path — income, industry trends, learning paths — in an in-depth guide on the Finxter blog here.

Bash Shell Developer

A bash developer creates scripts and software in the bash shell language. Bash is a Unix command processor that runs in a text window where the user types commands that cause actions (source).

Bash developers work in a wide range of fields such as web development, server architecture, security, databases, distributed systems, and administration.

The average annual income of a Bash Unix Shell Script Developer is $74,000 according to Ziprecruiter (source). PayScale lists an even higher annual income for a bash developer of $80,000

Learn More: I’ve compiled more information about this career path — income, industry trends, learning paths — in an in-depth guide on the Finxter blog here.

System Administrator

A system administrator (SysAdmin) is responsible for keeping a system, server, or server application running smoothly and without unexpected negative system behavior.

This involves tasks such as management, debugging, troubleshooting, licensing, and updating hardware and software systems.

A SysAdmin makes sure to proactively avoid negative system behavior such as security exploits, data loss, or system downtime.

How much does a System Administrator make per year?

The average annual income of a System Administrator in the United States is between $75,207 and $92,500, with an average of $83,088 and a statistical median of $84,031 per year.

Learn More: I’ve compiled more information about this career path — income, industry trends, learning paths — in an in-depth guide on the Finxter blog here.

Test Automation Engineer

A Test Automation Engineer is a software developer who creates automated software tests for existing or new applications. Testing is a crucial phase in the software development cycle to learn about bugs, usability, and security issues and fix them before deploying an application in the real world.

How much does a Test Automation Engineer in the US make per year?

The expected annual income of a Test Automation Engineer in the United States is between $74,821 and $120,000 per year, with an average annual income of $95,285 per year and a median income of $93,657 per year.

Learn More: I’ve compiled more information about this career path — income, industry trends, learning paths — in an in-depth guide on the Finxter blog here.

Conclusion

These are only some possible career paths as a white hat hacker. I’ve focused on the ones that require minimal learning time and switching costs.

But as hackers are often very proficient in programming languages and systems thinking, the opportunities are endless.

Also, feel free to check out our full guide on Python career opportunities for coders—I’m sure there are many opportunities that look exciting to you!

The best way to convert a CSV file to a Python dictionary is to create a CSV file object f using open("my_file.csv") and pass it in the csv.DictReader(f) method. The return value is an iterable of dictionaries, one per row in the CSV file, that maps the column header from the first row to the specific row value.

Let’s have a look at a simple example to demonstrate this solution next!

Basic Solution: CSV to Dict Example

Here’s the content of an example CSV file "my_file.csv" used in our code snippet below:

Name,Job,Age,Income
Alice,Programmer,23,110000
Bob,Executive,34,90000
Carl,Sales,45,50000

If you visualize this CSV in table form, it looks like this:

Here’s the code to convert that CSV file to multiple dictionaries, one dictionary per row by using the csv.DictReader(file) function:

import csv csv_filename = 'my_file.csv' with open(csv_filename) as f: reader = csv.DictReader(f) for row in reader: print(row)

A dictionary is a data structure that maps keys to values.

The output of the previous code snippet shows how the first row of the CSV is used as a header to determine the keys of the dictionary that are mapped to the values defined in the individual rows of the CSV file:

{'Name': 'Alice', 'Job': 'Programmer', 'Age': '23', 'Income': '110000'}
{'Name': 'Bob', 'Job': 'Executive', 'Age': '34', 'Income': '90000'}
{'Name': 'Carl', 'Job': 'Sales', 'Age': '45', 'Income': '50000'}

The csv.DictReader(f) method takes a file object f as an input argument. So, you first need to open the file using the built-in Python open() function.

Note: A common error is to pass the filename as a string—but this doesn’t work! The csv.DictReader(f) method expects a file object as a required argument.

One-Liner Solution: CSV to Dict

I love Python one-liners. That’s why I have written a book on those after all.

So, can we convert a CSV to a list of dictionaries in a single line of Python?

Of course, we can!

Here’s the one-liner that accomplishes the same as the code discussed before:

import csv; print(*csv.DictReader(open('my_file.csv')), sep='\n')

Explanation: We import the csv module, use the semicolon ; to package two statements in one line, unpack * all rows from the csv.DictReader() output in a print statement, and use the newline character '\n' as a separator between two dictionary rows.

The output is the same as before:

{'Name': 'Alice', 'Job': 'Programmer', 'Age': '23', 'Income': '110000'}
{'Name': 'Bob', 'Job': 'Executive', 'Age': '34', 'Income': '90000'}
{'Name': 'Carl', 'Job': 'Sales', 'Age': '45', 'Income': '50000'}

If you just want to store the CSV contents in a list of dictionaries rather than printing them, you can use the following technique:

import csv; lst=[*csv.DictReader(open('my_file.csv'))]; print(lst)

The output is a list of dictionaries, one per (non-header) row of the original CSV:

[{'Name': 'Alice', 'Job': 'Programmer', 'Age': '23', 'Income': '110000'}, {'Name': 'Bob', 'Job': 'Executive', 'Age': '34', 'Income': '90000'}, {'Name': 'Carl', 'Job': 'Sales', 'Age': '45', 'Income': '50000'}]

If you’re interested in learning one-liners as well, feel free to check out my book:

Python One-Liners Book: Master the Single Line First!

Python programmers will improve their computer science skills with these useful one-liners.

Python One-Liners will teach you how to read and write “one-liners”: concise statements of useful functionality packed into a single line of code. You’ll learn how to systematically unpack and understand any line of Python code, and write eloquent, powerfully compressed Python like an expert.

The book’s five chapters cover (1) tips and tricks, (2) regular expressions, (3) machine learning, (4) core data science topics, and (5) useful algorithms.

Detailed explanations of one-liners introduce key computer science concepts and boost your coding and analytical skills. You’ll learn about advanced Python features such as list comprehension, slicing, lambda functions, regular expressions, map and reduce functions, and slice assignments.

You’ll also learn how to:

• Leverage data structures to solve real-world problems, like using Boolean indexing to find cities with above-average pollution
• Use NumPy basics such as array, shape, axis, type, broadcasting, advanced indexing, slicing, sorting, searching, aggregating, and statistics
• Calculate basic statistics of multidimensional data arrays and the K-Means algorithms for unsupervised learning
• Create more advanced regular expressions using grouping and named groups, negative lookaheads, escaped characters, whitespaces, character sets (and negative characters sets), and greedy/nongreedy operators
• Understand a wide range of computer science topics, including anagrams, palindromes, supersets, permutations, factorials, prime numbers, Fibonacci numbers, obfuscation, searching, and algorithmic sorting

By the end of the book, you’ll know how to write Python at its most refined, and create concise, beautiful pieces of “Python art” in merely a single line.

Get your Python One-Liners on Amazon!!