Arctic Wolf

Most North American teams are excellent, with talented, knowledgeable, and collaborative engineers who genuinely care about their work. Compensation is decent for a Canadian technology company. The company has a modern technology stack with opportunities to work on interesting technical problems.

Executive leadership is completely incompetent. The company's entire strategy seems to revolve around layoffs, outsourcing engineering to India, cutting OPEX, and accumulating technical debt. North American engineers are repeatedly laid off while work and promotions shift to India. Offshore teams frequently require handholding, introduce production incidents, and leave North American engineers to clean up the mess during unpaid after-hours on-call rotations. Accountability is nonexistent. Constant layoffs have created a toxic, politically charged environment where employees are more interested in arguing, protecting their positions, and appearing important than delivering quality work. The executive marketing strategy is pure AI brainrot.

Leadership throws around buzzwords like "Super Instinct" and "Super Intelligence" while literally laying off the North American VP of AI. Apparently, AI innovation means putting buzzwords in PowerPoint presentations while eliminating the people who understand the technology. The company keeps acquiring older businesses with seemingly no coherent strategy for integrating their technology. The result is an increasingly fragmented product, mounting technical debt, and deteriorating quality. Meanwhile, executives appear more interested in protecting their bonuses and short-term financial metrics than building a sustainable company.