Pros
It's a great job for someone out of college as it enables you to build confidence in delivering presentations and technical demos. For new college graduates looking for client facing opportunities, this is a great place to start. You get to really work on rounding out your soft skills and that goes a long way in your career. Furthermore, you also get to learn about networking and cybersecurity. You also get to travel (sans pandemic) and go to a lot of neat places.
Cons
- Poor management: Leadership is extremely difficult to communicate with. On top of this, they also tend to move very slowly. I was promised a raise that would come into effect roughly a month after my review, pending board review/approval. This process unfortunately took more than 4 months, and they came back with a "raise" that was a lot less than my expectations and what we had discussed during the review. There's also little to no mentorship for newer employees. - Extremely low pay: While internally we are referred to as Cyber Technologists, our true title should be Sales/Solutions Engineers. On average, SE's across industry verticals can expect to earn 30-40% more base salary with added commission on top of that for the deals that they close. At Darktrace, it seems like they are trying to take advantage of new graduates by giving them a different title, and paying them a lot less than the average pay for a sales engineer. As a CT at Darktrace, you're entitled to quarterly bonuses that are honestly laughable. Account Executives do receive a hefty amount of commission for the deals that they close, but us as CT's tend to do more work than them on the account but we really see no reward for it. - Not a team culture: While CT's and AE's work together on closing accounts as a "team", the two departments are ultimately working towards two different goals. AE"s on one hand have an incentive to close deals as they need to earn commission. CT's on the other hand have no financial incentive to help close these deals as there's no commission that can be earned by the technical team. When deals close, the fact of the matter is that it results in more work for the CT's with no added incentive. Furthermore I'd also add that majority of these deals close because the CT's are adding technical value to these meetings and going above and beyond to prove value to the prospects. No client simply buys Darktrace because of a sales pitch, they do so because of the work that the CTs put in to make sure that the client understands the software and can see how it would be valuable for their teams. Because of the work that CTs have to put in, I hope moving forward they begin to pay out commission or have an OTE structure.