- Beyond toxic culture of workplace politics, backstabbing, rampant favoritism and quid pro quo.
- Workplace harassment, bullying and isolation orchestrated by local “management” as a retaliatory tool to force disliked employees to resign. If you refuse to play "by the rules" and are smart/decent enough to not allow being manipulated by one’s unethical business agenda, instead choosing to do and say what is right, you are immediately labelled as "negative" and end up being alienated and ostracized by the fellow workers, as personally orchestrated by a certain director-level staff.
- E.g., I have personally witnessed on countless occasions, since 2019 onwards, how one director-level employee (still employed by the company, beware) attempted to get rid of certain disliked team members by first seeking to relocate them to another office location in Australia or, when this miserably failed, trying to make them quit voluntarily by deliberately orchestrating a hostile and ostracizing workplace environment in concert with a sizeable group of loyal subordinates who acted akin to a local gang that would try to enforce their matriarch’s local “ground rules”. The targeted individuals were deliberately given cold and unwelcome treatment and made isolated and ignored. Moreover, their notable ongoing contributions to the business were fully suppressed and hidden as much as possible from the broader team / higher management overseas and hardly ever recognized publicly. Gossip and rumor would be used to spread lies and affect other fellow co-workers’ perception of the targeted individuals (e.g., various accusations in private conversations behind one’s back). The entire bullying and level of toxicity in the office was so immense that I personally had to seek professional counselling and commence antidepressant therapy that is still ongoing. Other decent colleagues have on purpose completely isolated themselves in fear of “insulting” the herd.
- Certain employees try to succeed and prove loyalty to management by being willing to go as far as stabbing their own people in their back whenever commanded to do so by their senior puppeteers. On one occasion, I witnessed a premediated scenario where one CT employee disliked and targeted by a director-level employee was purposely accused of abusing corporate travel policy and immediately reported by his manager to higher management overseas. The "manager" had never even tried to speak to the targeted employee neither before nor after the incident. Unsurprisingly, the travel turned out to have been for a fully legitimate interstate trip that had in fact been approved beforehand by the relevant company department. I understand that no apology has ever been given to the targeted employee; in fact, these subtly planned bullying attempts on part of the orchestrators only persisted going forward.
- Adding on to the above points on harassment: previous multiple instances of inappropriate touching and body contact in the office. E.g., some employees give unwanted shoulder massages.
- Many new joiners, especially sales, have no choice but play by the rules and get involved into workplace politics and unethical conduct so as to prove loyalty and earn trust of their “managers” and thereby increase chances of receiving preferential treatment such as access to lucrative opportunities / customer accounts, sales territories, more opportunity for internal fake “promotions” etc.
- Systematic deceit. The company leads on their workers and gives fake promises. They will try to waste your time as much as possible to prevent you from leaving.
- Severe, insane underpayment (at least 40-50% below the market rate). The company deliberately hires cheap labour (fresh uni graduates or people with no background in cyber). Employees are treated like slaves and disposables no matter how talented and valuable they are.
- Looking for fresh grads also due to easy exploitation
- Zero interest in talent retention. The company won't even budge to try to keep its best people and would be happy to let go of an invaluable team member, only to then throw away tens of thousands of dollars on recruiting, interviewing, onboarding and training of a new inexperienced staff who can (and, from my experience, most likely will) resign in less than a year. The company's motto is essentially: "if you don't like it here, you can get out".
- No such thing as annual performance and salary reviews. You have to push really hard for your pay rises and even if you succeed, you can only expect about 5-6% increase at best. There were several cases of certain high-performing employees having been with the company for 2+ years (which is extremely rare for this company) yet having never received a single pay rise. Pathetic.
- Very shady business with highly questionable and unethical practices, to put it mildly. Before you even consider joining this company (which you shouldn't), make sure you look up "Autonomy HP fraud" on Google to get an eye-opening perspective into the sort of individuals you could be potentially working for (FYI Darktrace's senior and mid management is dominated by former Autonomy staff).
- Former Board member Mike Lynch being extradited to the US. Bonus: google "Sushovan Hussain" (former C-level exec) as well.
- Management makes everyone drink the cool-aid and punishes anyone who voices concerns or offers constructive criticism. I am aware of a case when an engineer in Sydney got financially punished by the CEO herself (had his quarterly bonus docked) due to openly sharing constructive feedback on important ongoing issues during an SKO event. I can only wonder what FairWork Australia would in theory have to say regarding this (not to mention all the other points related to harassment, bullying, managerial retaliation, etc.)
- Resembles a ponzi scheme. The executives clearly put their people last and their pockets first.
- Pathetic leadership (none!). The company doesn’t even have any formally articulated corporate values that would inform employee conduct and behavior. Truly embarrassing.
- During one local SKO event, the company’s CEO Puppy Gustaffson described the business as a “rising rocket heading to the moon” and publicly labelled all the employees offering critical feedback and voicing any concerns as negative cynics who simply “can’t handle the rocket turbulence and start vomiting all over the place” and hence don’t belong to the company’s “space journey”. If this is not cultish and creepy, then I don’t know what is.
- Subpar product when you actually realize what it really is and what it is NOT (e.g., not really AI - ask any machine learning expert).
- Customers complain when they wake up and realize what they actually bought.
- No commission structure for sales engineers despite this now being a de facto standard in the industry. Embarrassing.
- No career progression. The company gives away meaningless, empty and inflated "mentor", "team lead" and director" titles to recent uni grads or people who barely have any experience in their field. Some people were made "mentors" in their 2nd-3rd month since joining the company. None of these laughable "promotions" even includes a pay rise. 3-4% at most if you are lucky.
- Incompetent inexperienced staff with inflated job titles (see above). Don't expect to have a manager here under whom you can develop and grow. Don't be surprised if your manager is a 20-something year old who doesn’t have any background/education in your occupation and instead wrote his Honours thesis on snail reproduction back at uni.
- No active office manager and local HR person on the ground in Australia - Expenses paid out with a month’s delay. Must use your own credit card for business expenses
- Unprecedented, MASSIVE turn over in staff. People drop like flies.
- Utterly shocking and completely unacceptable incidents of employee conduct. E.g., several employees snorting cocaine after hours in the office during their fellow AE’s farewell drinks back in 2019.
- A few incidents of barely qualified people being hired for “senior” jobs because of personal connections. Qualified and experienced candidates were rejected.
- Pestering potential customers until they start dropping F bombs. On one occasion in 2019, one director-level staff forced a local rep to keep bugging a POV prospect who had already been very annoyed and requested very firmly to not disturb him for a few weeks because he was very ill. The director, however, compelled her rep to still call the sick customer who, as a result, completely lost it and started screaming and swearing over the phone. The ill customer was pestered and disturbed so much that he literally yelled “I told you to *** leave me alone! ** this! ** Darktrace! I don’t care if I lose my job after this!”.
- Management retaliates against you if you openly voice concerns about malpractices within the business.
- Sales reps only get paid 50% of their commissions, the other 50% is paid only after 12 months (assuming you are still with the company, of course). Technically speaking, this means that at any given point of time, the company owes its employees half of all the made commissions over the previous 12 months. No decent company on planet Earth does this.
- No stock options / incentives. No employee benefits to take care of employee wellbeing (e.g., no private medical cover, no allowances, no nothing!). The company completely does not care about its people.
- Everyone is secretly hating the company and can’t wait to get out ASAP. People who are still there either simply can’t find anything better OR are desperately waiting to dump their stocks post the recent IPO. Get ready for a massive staff exodus once the stock dumping begins.
