Looking for vulnerabilities is the last thing I do

A senior application security engineer explains why actively hunting for vulnerabilities is the last priority, not the first. Before bug-finding, the real work involves assessing security maturity, improving incident response processes, training developers, establishing secure coding standards, identifying security champions per team, and instrumenting build pipelines with SCA, secret scanning, and SAST. Only once this foundation is in place does systematic vulnerability discovery become productive—otherwise, finding bugs without the organizational infrastructure to handle them creates burnout and leaves the org no better off.