So I’ve been at a cyber software company for 6 years now and we have grown from ~250 people to ~1,000 and were sold and merged in the process. After many of the execs cashed out, the entire upper management team has changed since the re-branding and we’re doing worse than ever in terms of bookings growth (used to be 20-40% yoy and we just did -25% while our top competitor is still doing great). Of course management only reports growth in ARR which is only coming from switching perpetual customers to subscription licensing. At the end of last year we laid off over 200 people after spending wild amounts of money of presidents club and a global company kick off in Vegas.
Today they’re way underpaying people who grew the company and know it inside and out compared to new reps claiming that we have less experience in enterprise sales (85-90k base compared to 130 – 180k base for new reps). They have also fucked up the product trying to build everything into one UI (no innovation, and the new platform has tons of technical and licensing issues). Our customers are currently suffering from under-deployed solutions and many of them are being told they’ll have to migrate without any real path to do so (customer success and pro services teams are way understaffed/qualified and have no incentive to deliver quality programs). The CEO blamed the slowdown on poor sales execution (even though we have some of the best sellers in the market) and now they’re forcing training that is overkill in 95% of deals and pressuring us to squeeze every penny out of customers that are already under-deployed or having serious product issues. There are many other issues/details that I’d like to share here, but overall, being in this position has made me realize that no one really cares about the customers or reps and it seems to only be about profitability while they work reps to the bone and give them no real support. I have heard that this is all too common, so I’m wondering if I should try to move to a new company or just change careers and start an outdoor company like I dream about.