Ark Tek Solutions
Names of companies have been substituted for the sake of anonymity. Also, I am not getting any sponsorships so they don’t get a mention in my articles.
Leading to the Decision
The decision to join Ark Tek Solutions was driven by my internal compass taking charge too late. About 20 months too late. Before this, I was part of this company called the Acme Corporation.
Acme Corporation specializes in behind-the-scene telecommunication operations. The only problem is that about 50-60% of their revenue comes from a fraudulent practice that is adopted by every player in the industry. The short of it is: get your riches by sucking the hyperscale enterprises dry. The enterprises know it. That’s why this is an ever-depleting market.
I got to know of this practice during my 2nd month of employment when my unsuspecting manager shared a regular old business case file with me & I accidently stumbled upon a sheet with some odd terminology on it. I researched about it and made complete understanding of the operation.
I thought about going public with it, debated the findings with a lot of folk, but ultimately decided to shun myself because it was spelling career suicide at that stage. Plus, I’d already resigned from my previous job which I stayed at for only 3 months. At that point in time I needed stability and it felt like the best choice.
Things were going well. I had settled into the role. I was locked in, crunching number, and crushing targets throughout 2024 and 2025. Fast forward to January 2026 and it was bonus season. I got a fat paycheck. I made a lot of money. Too much in fact. I’m talking 4-5 gross salaries at once.
That’s when the realization kicked in. That money wasn’t all white. I made the conscious decision to pull myself away from what I wasn’t aligned with from the beginning. Yeah, I got rich but that was going to be the end of it.
What compounded to my decision was the onboarding of a senior resource onto my team whose sole job was to make the fraud even more efficient through ML & AI integration. Of course, he didn’t know what he was getting into. Nor were we going to tell him. He had a lot of questions and we just lied to him about what he was seeing. God bless that poor man. He bought it all. The toll of lying got to me. I couldn’t stand it anymore.
The Walk
On February 01, I called up an old Peruvian friend of mine & invited him for a walk in the renowned Faith Jones Park in Indianapolis. I told him the entire story and took his two cents. He convinced me that it was indeed time to move on and take the next bold step.
The Golf Course
Just as I was looking, an opportunity sprung up. A college senior who had been following my Instagram posts (for maybe 4 years?) shared a job description for a role he had been trying to fill in for about 8 months. In the past, I’d recommend someone’s profile and not think too much of it. This time around, I fed him my own resume. He helped me prepare for the interview and I was selected but I rejected the initial offer because it was too damn low. So, on February 28, he invited me for golf.
Now, I’ve been living in this place for 15 years and had no clue about the golf course. Like what the actual hell. Talk about a well-kept secret.
Anyways, he plays golf while I drag his cart and I get convinced that joining the team would be a good idea. I swallow the bitter pill, accept the matched-salary offer and put in my resignation the very next day.
Ark Tek Solutions
The Good
What defines a good workplace? Is it the work? Is it the people? Or is it the atmosphere? I’ve given my opinion based on a framework I believe in, a couple of sections down.
Before I get into the details of what I genuinely loved about my job, here’s what Business Analysts actually do.
In a nutshell, they sit at the intersection of business and technology teams to translate vague requirements into technical solutions for problems presented to them.
Keep screwing up physical documentation? Let my team build you a structured form.
Forgot when your next safety inspection is supposed to be? I’ll have my team make you an end-to-end tracking platform.
Losing too many court battles because the judge says your cases are too weak? We’ll orchestrate a tool that drafts air-tight prosecutions, grounded in law, that will guarantee wins every time.
Now onto what I genuinely enjoyed about the work:
The position was made for the kind of person I am: someone with just the right amount of business & technical knowledge to understand exactly what problem the client is facing and how to convert it into a feasible technical solution.
I enjoy a bit of “power” that comes with being at the epicenter. As my CEO put it, “the business analyst’s word should be treated as gospel.” When you’re at the focal point of every decision, everything flows through you, and you have the authority to guide everything about a platform, wouldn’t you enjoy it?
Historically, I have a really bad attention span (only God knows how I’ve managed to write this piece) & this job had just enough diversity to it that no two days were the same. I’d be ping-ponging between projects addressing completely separate problems.
To quote my lead, “You’re literally another me.” If your relationship with your lead is that solid, you’d absolutely want to show up to work everyday. Zero micromanagement, and complete autonomy is what defined my time with him.
I haven’t credited any people to adding to my liking for work. Obviously I had a work-friend group but some forces tried breaking that up until the last day. Great bunch of people though. Genuinely, haven’t had that kind of fun in a long while.
The Bad
I want to talk about the hilariously bad elements that for some reason they haven’t worked on.
I was asked by the recruiter to share my current & expected compensation to another company representative on WhatsApp.
Strange to communicate over an informal channel instead of email, I thought. Sure, I’ll do that. Looks like he’ll be the final boss of negotiation. I’ll prepare my responses accordingly.
The final boss negotiated over voice notes. Not calls. Not texts. Voice notes…
Okay, this is getting comical now. I could play them again to unpack the reason but I don’t have enough in me to do that.I got the offer letter over email but it didn’t have my compensation details on it. It was just a giant block of text. Adding insult to injury, it was on the old letterhead.
This had me go on a tirade about first impressions and how good companies take extra care in external communication to ensure the best image is projected to prospecting employees.On the first day, I signed all of my documents which happened to be on the new letterhead. Again, the employment contract didn’t have a breakdown of the compensation details. Instead, it was on a separate paper. If I recall correctly, there was a deliberate discrepancy on there (for tax purposes).
Took my sweet time reading through all of the documents. Going as far as taking an extra hour to first get clarification on a clause from external contacts before signing the employment agreement.I was given a 3-month growth plan meticulously curated to bring me up to speed with the work.
The HR version was a word document in which somebody had forgotten to disable “track changes” so I had a fun time reading through the iterations of that file.
The version handed to me by HR was completely different than what my supervisor was following.
Of course neither was followed. I covered all of the points within a single month.
The “probation evaluation” form was a generic form with repeating statements. No final score section. Evaluations were supposed to be stand-alone with no reference to the previous months’ performance. HR told me to “forget about last month. Only focus on the current month’s performance.”
I could be dumb here but… shouldn’t you be evaluating yourself to some benchmark? In this case, the previous month? One of my Danish ex-colleague’s motto in life sums it up really well: better than yesterday, worse than tomorrow.Ark Tek Solutions is the company’s alias on Glassdoor [← link]. This development came after (rightfully deserved) negative reviews flooded the company’s page. In a typical defensive move, instead of taking concrete steps to fix the issues, it was decided that camouflaging would be the most appropriate response to critique. The company’s website was also taken down for a few days to tackle SEO.
The Ugly
Two-Factor Theory
I am an avid follower of Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory Of Motivation-Hygiene. It explains what causes job satisfaction and dissatisfaction among employees.
Motivational factors: These factors create genuine job satisfaction and motivate employees to perform better. For example, recognition for good work, greater responsibility, achievement, and opportunities for promotion can increase motivation.
Hygiene factors: These factors do not necessarily motivate employees, but their absence can cause dissatisfaction. For example, poor salary, unsafe working conditions, or unfair company policies may make employees unhappy.
Read more here [← link]
The motivation factors were alright but the hygiene factors were absolutely absent from this place.
Poor Salary: It was great for someone with zero experience in the field. My problem: they made a commitment to raise it after my probation which they didn’t fulfill.
Unfair company policies: If they don’t exist on paper, of course, you’ll find favors being granted to individual employees based on personal relations.
Relationship with colleagues:
With people on the same team, it was brilliant. The same team here being all of the technical folk I was working with.
With “managerial people”, not so much. This mostly addresses the minions whose jobs rely on moral policing rather than substantiable work.
Other Things
Ark Tek Solutions has (or had) two arms: a Danish sales arm and a Polish technical arm. The sales arm, having clientele across Denmark, would bring in leads, while the technical arm, based in Poland because of labor arbitrage, would actually develop the software solutions.
Back in December 2025, a major client who happened to have massive capital acquired the Danish arm. The problem? Now the technical team would have to build a local sales arm to deploy in Denmark to keep the business running.
The transition itself isn’t anything extraterrestrial. It’s a common practice in the world of mergers & acquisitions. The problem arises when leadership starts mishandling the transition.
Nobody was told about this acquisition.
A third of the company was put on performance improvement to make people #feel-the-heat in difficult times. Reasons as stupid as “the designs you make don’t have Danish placeholder names in them” were given.
8-9 people were let go as a result in a humiliating fashion.
Another 5-6 left on their own accord.
To map cost centers, the chief decided to split the company into sub-brands so that it would be easier to visualize expense heads. I’m sure there is a far better, more robust reasoning than what I’ve provided here. It could be a tax break. Who knows. I certainly don’t.
The Weird
The company took the entirety of its workforce on a sponsored trip to Schilthorn.
I’m grateful for this as I got to tag along in my second week.New joiners were told to give “a welcome treat” from their first pay check to the entire company.
I didn’t completely mind that but asking anyone to cough up what could be up to 10% of their pay is diabolical on so many levels.I won a prize coupon by absolutely destroying a co-worker: I employed a battletested trick called “racism”.
It was only redeemable as an expense reimbursement. Filled my car up with gas to get it redeemed.Leadership training by a sales professional…
If you know the nerdy side of my personality, you would know I’m all for leadership development. But by a sales trainer who is in love with AI-generated decks? That too to the entire company that’s a software house? Why would you do that? That sounds a little stupid. It’s not the right audience for that kind of training. A developer doesn’t care about management sciences. He only cares about opportunities that would advance his technical expertise. It’s a bad approach but you need to have a certain mindset to transition from development to management. Know your audience, people.My offboarding was really smooth. A sharp contrast to how people on PIP were treated. I was cradled while they were thrown out of a speeding car- 24 hours before my last working day. It sure left a bad taste.
The Resignation
Seeing that the company wasn’t fulfilling its commitments to the workforce, the mishandling of resources, and general lack of professionalism, I put in my resignation sometime in August. My experience letter is another masterpiece in the tale of Ark Tek Solutions: the Anglo-Saxons would be rolling in their graves right now.
The End
This was a structured rant. The only AI-generated part is the summary of Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory. I plan on using substack to write about more things that are in my mind. Let’s see where this goes.
Postscript
The reasons put forth in this story don’t even skim the surface behind my resignation. These are just public-facing opinions that everyone can understand. The actual decision to quit was backed by events that manifested in the form of traumas.
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The author is an entitled brat who regularly contributes to nothing.