What is your favorite part of your job?

Disassembling devices

What is your least favorite part?

Bureaucracy

What is your average workday like?

You come on in at 8 in the morning. After an hour of drinking coffee, saying a few words to your coworkers and checking your email, you choose a case from the pile that has accumulated over the past week - a pile that never stops growing, no matter how fast you work. You read the summary of what, why, when, and pick up the objects (usually phones, computers and digital video recorders) associated with the case from the vault. You disassemble the devices to take out their storage units (HDDs, SSDs, Optical/Flash drives) and create an exact copy of the data inside using special equipment. Best case scenario, it all works flawlessly. Worst case scenario (the more common one), storage units are old/worn down/broken which calls for a more special equipment and jumping of technological loops to achieve a simple task. When you finally prepare the data for examination, you search for evidence that is ordered by the law enforcement/law agents. After you find what you need, you start the documentation process - form after form, where you describe what, when, where, how you found something. Everything has to be recorded, in a very detail and specific manner. One slip up, and you can get called to court to defend your statements. One bigger slip up, and you can get a huge fine, lose your job and even end up in jail (for a very big slip up or intentional forgery of evidence). You finish a case by assembling back the devices, preparing all the paperwork and sending it all to the law enforcement officers/law agents that ordered it. The worse parts of this job is by far the amount of bureaucracy involved in doing the simplest of things and the constant surveillance of your work and activity during it (which is a bit too much, I would say). And the worst part is that for all of this stressful work you get paid a relatively low wage. And there is very little room for improvement, as you hit the career ceiling after a couple of years, next roles being the management (of which are a very small number of positions available). To sum up, job in the forensic field is only for someone that genuinely loves crime investigation and would do the job because of the work itself and not the money/career potential.

How social is your job?

Moderately social

How did you end up in your field

I did my internship and no one else was hiring at the time.

On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your work life balance?

6

What traits make a person successful in your field?

Mental strength (you see some f'ed up stuff that stays with you), firm beliefs in greater good and a strong sense of justice and duty.

On a scale of 1-10, how happy are you in your career?

3