Darktrace Reviews

Growing pains with fast growth

* Very few reps come close to their target (£435k per quarter), and an even smaller fraction meet or exceed it -not good when you are on £30k basic. * Once you finish onboarding in Cambridge, you’re essentially thrown into it. You are only taught how to do a first meeting - many AEs feel they have regressed as salespeople due to the lack of training. * You will do the overwhelming majority of your own prospecting - after the first couple of months where your calendar is padded, UK reps are lucky to receive two meetings a month with small companies (only from the UK - an oversaturated market), with zero qualification. * The in-built CRM, Sparta, is appalling. It’s very labour-intensive to find opportunities or upload contacts, filtering doesn’t work, and larger accounts will have several duplicates because nobody monitors the deal pool. Most AEs work from Excel sheets. The only third-party tool you will use is Sales Navigator. * There are no territory lists in spite of regionalisation, just a complete free-for-all between 150+ AEs and the inside sales team, with all the associated problems that typically brings. * Pushing a product as expensive as Darktrace in 1 month is ambitious, to put it politely. If your prospect has to push a meeting back, can’t get hold of their CFO, if we shipped them a defective appliance, you are made to feel responsible for it. * Inexperienced Sales Mentors and Commercial Directors create a hostile environment in their teams by being entirely numbers-driven and motivating primarily through fear. * In a 1,200-employee company, sales staff are incredibly top-heavy. This imbalance is worsening with each passing month - at one stage in January they were hiring roughly 10 AEs for every Cyber Technologist (your primary pre-sales resource). * You’ll spend 5 hours a month manually doing your expenses, and your cash flow will constantly be £1-2k down because of waiting on expenses. * The office is cluttered and soul-sucking, but at least it exists, unlike the office culture. People feel like they’re being watched, you rarely hear laughter, and even the top performers have a curiously dead look in their eyes. Team socials are very infrequent and you pay your own way. Many people book meetings or take events in other countries just to get out of the office. The dress code is heavily-policed, and far more formal than necessary. * Recruiters that work with Darktrace are briefed to hire attractive blonde women, and there have been incidents where prospects have harassed female reps. Management will openly reference the fact that their workforce is attractive, even in public settings. * There is huge inflexibility in taking leave - as an AE you are not allowed to book holiday during the last week of any month, or the last fortnight of the quarter (30% of the year). * You never really ’see’ any of the exotic places you travel to, other than the airport and the inside of your hotel. You’ll also end up working way longer than your contracted hours without overtime the constant travel harms your mental health. * The pressure you are encouraged to put on customers is unethical and borderline disrespectful, to the extent that CISO WhatsApp groups exist specifically to share negative experiences with Darktrace. When you do close, it is a sense of relief, not of joy. * Darktrace overcharges its clients by using the internal Network Interface Cards on devices to 'inflate' the IP count. Customers are beginning to wake up to this and the results have not been pretty so far. * I had colleagues whose physical health was adversely affected (panic attacks and so on) by the threat of dismissal. Somebody was famously dismissed after announcing their pregnancy, and others have been fired literally the day after closing deals, priced by months of threatening phone calls from legal. * Most of the senior leadership team were employees of Autonomy, and Autonomy’s founder is the owner of the largest investor in Darktrace. This connection gets brought up in customer meetings more than it should, and harms Darktrace’s image. * COVID-19 - Darktrace continued to let staff travel to customer sites for far too long (in other countries no less), and the MD EMEA personally intervened to keep reps from returning to their home countries to be with family. Working from home was characterised by a complete lack of trust, beginning with 6 daily team calls (with no agenda, just to check you were working). Regular hours changed from 9:30am to 8:30am due to extra accountability measures. Work finishes at 6pm as usual, policed by the final team call of the day. Senior management often joined. Quotas remained the same, despite Darktrace requiring an on-site installation, and there being an impending recession. Darktrace also took the opportunity to dismiss many people with zero notice or formal written warnings.