Where to begin? For a company which has spent every waking moment of its life talking about how there is a substantial shortage of cyber security professionals in Australia, CyberCX doesn't make it easy at all to stay in cyber security. The company is so inhospitable to staff, particularly juniors, that the lower ranks of the company are more revolving door than workforce. The good people - and there are good people here - are so often shut out by toxic, often sexist, leadership that they simply depart or are bullied into leaving. The problem is management. Most or all CyberCX's problems are self-inflicted by management. It is hard to advance up the ladder without a personal or family attachment to a member of management. Managers rarely live up to their promises and prefer to get so caught up in their own politicking and personal affairs that problems raised by staff are never followed up upon. It was not uncommon to hear managers verbally abusing more junior staff for minor mistakes. Culture flows down from the top, and it is difficult to see how the leadership would not be aware of this. Even if there are good managers, they are drowned out by the bad. If an issue is brought up, you will be gaslit into dropping the issue. Anything from culture to bringing up issues with training, bullying, an inability to advance without a relationship with specific managers, all of it will be reduced down into nothing. This is often done to take heat away from the in-group and works very well. Even something as small as taking leave for a funeral is too big an issue. There was also a non-negotiable expectation to work long hours for nil benefit, such as writing proposals for work far beyond the ability of the company to carry out (for a range of reasons such as skills or a simple lack of qualified resources in a given area). The people writing these proposals are often unqualified juniors themselves with no prior experience in cyber, business, or consulting. Refuse? Expect more verbal abuse or gaslighting. CyberCX does not train its staff. It has the Academy, which does not provide training beyond the Google-able basics of cyber. New staff were also left alone with no guidance on client sites for extended periods of time. Juniors are treated as churn-and-burn resources and rarely last longer than a year. When they leave, many do not move elsewhere in the cyber industry, and leave altogether. And I haven't even mentioned how bad the pay is!
