Many Promises, None Kept - Account Executive Darktrace Employee Review

I took about a 50% salary cut out of the promise for ability to quickly rise up the ranks and the glamour of traveling and being able to make sales face to face. While I personally enjoyed the traveling portion, I quickly discovered from fellow employees that the ability to travel comes at a cost. That cost will be your work/life balance and happiness. Management doesn't care if you have been traveling until 2am, they still expect you to be in office at 8 am. Doesnt't matter if you have a flight at 10:30 am, you should still be coming into the office beforehand. You are really just another dispensable employee to them. That concept was emphasized by the horrendous training experience and onboarding, all the way to my departure. While the training is normally difficult and takes about 3 months to complete, I did it on my own and got fully certified to be in the field in about a month. That says a lot considering all the information they throw at you and the fact that I wasn't assigned a mentor (like everyone is) and didn't have a team for a few weeks. I then came to find that the team I was placed on was with a new manager (who was still working on her own deals) and we didn't have a team lead (every other team had one). I still made it work though and kept pushing through thinking that I could perserve and that the glassdoor reviews "wouldn't apply to me"...how naive I was. Turns out working hard wasn't even going to save me from the dispensable mentality they had towards their employees. I was the first to be cut due to Covid, which came as a complete shock for many reasons. 1. I went over and beyond to get my training done on my own, despite all my issues. 2. I had been already booking meetings within a month. I learned that must've been abnormally quick, given the amount of comments from coworkers and management. 3. When we all started working from home, I voiced my tech issues and not being able to get onto our internal system. Our system frequently timed out because it was so overloaded by all the employees working remotely so this wasn't new news to them. When I asked for help though, I would often go hours without any assistance so I could not even login for work. 4. When the rumor mill started about people being spoken to about their performance (keep in mind, this company consists of a bunch of 20 year olds so yes there is a full-time rumor mill and even private text thread to talk about other employees), I was not one of them. Members of my small team were even spoken to about their metrics, but I was never addressed as I was consistently reaching out. Then came my layoff. In what I thought was going to be my 60 day check in from our VP, he instead bomboarded me on a call with the legal team. Luckily, my partner is a lawyer and he was able to get on the call with me as what they were asking was unethical. In addition to that, I had multiple employees tell me and then even send me a video of the VP telling everyone on a conference that I was laid off because "I wasn't working at all when we went remote." Even though I was there for 2 months, the employees clearly trusted me more than their own VP as they wanted to let me know because it was so clearly not true. He just used me as a scapegoat to ensure there wasn't a covid layoff panic. At no point during a call with legal did he mention performance issues (he said it was a covid layoff) and my manager even called me after saying she did not expect this, that I was a "hardworker", apologized and even offered to give me a recommendation. Quite frankly, Darktrace is lucky I didn't sue them for famation. I would have if the VP consented to himself being recorded, but I wouldn't have been able to use it in court. Hope this story helps anyone considering this company. I thought I would be different than all these other stories. My experience just confirms it.