All good things come to an end - Anonymous employee Palo Alto Networks Employee Review

2.0
Jun 8, 2017
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

If you joined by mid-2014, the stock has done well enough to make up for the otherwise lackluster compensation.

Cons

The technology is brittle. It prevents commodity threats passably well, but any competent attacker can easily bypass every part of the platform. Customers aren't savvy enough to understand this, which makes customer-facing roles morally challenging for those who know just how mediocre the products are. Some of the engineering teams, threat and platform especially, are caught in an endless death march because management is unwilling and unable to properly staff or properly plan. If you're an engineer it's awful to go through, and if you work with engineering it's awful to watch. The homegrown managers are almost universally strong individual contributors who stumbled into leadership roles for which they're ill-suited. It's the Peter principle writ large. Product management is particularly bad here, but this problem touches every group in the company. In an effort to grow quickly, recent middle management is mostly imported from dinosaurs like Juniper. They failed to drive their previous companies forward, and now they're failing at Palo Alto Networks. The result is a washed-out culture and sharply declining performance --- the nail in the coffin.

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Pros

Solid company in terms of growth

Cons

Startup culture for a big company

1.0
Jun 30, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Largest cyber security company in the world with an ever-expanding portfolio

Cons

Largest cyber security company in the world with an ever-expanding portfolio. They buy companies quicker than they can integrate them and is the antithesis of a caring employer. Nikesh could layoff 80% of employees tomorrow and the stock would still skyrocket. I decided to pursue a new opportunity after CyberArk was acquired and prior to giving my official two week notice I let my team know, and started training them in our brand new cutting edge solutions so that they could take over my workload without any roadblocks or hiccups. As soon as I put in my two week notice the company locks me out and cuts off all of my benefits and does not pay me for the notice that I have given, putting my family in a very precarious place during the interim of my work. This is by far one of the most classless things I’ve seen a company do, please watch out for yourself at Palo because no one in management will. I am extremely passionate about the space that I operate in and often found myself working 12 hour days- the ability to have work life balance at a place like Palo Alto is zero.

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