Bad leadership, huge politics, backwards strategy. A smattering of good people to make it barely tolerable. - Anonymous employee Palo Alto Networks Employee Review

1.0
Sep 15, 2020
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pays well, stock does well for no apparent reason, has large captive customer base. There's a few great people here. Unfortunately none of them are leading the ship.

Cons

Mistreats engineering and devops employees and perpetuates a culture of fear and favoritism. Reporting any of this to HR goes right back to the engineering leadership and immediately results in retaliation. HR is not there to help the employees, but rather protects the executive bad behavior and silences the voices of the people trying to do the right thing. Leadership basically hired all the people Google doesn't want. They are trying desperately to be G. Nikesh swept in a huge bunch of underqualified folks who suppress the qualified people and use their hard work to impress him. For a company trying to be "cloud", they refused to accept distributed workforce until Covid left them no choice. They migrated acquisitions from gmail/gsuite to on-prem antiquated systems and then had to do an about face -- costing months of productivity. This stuff is rampant and goes much further than this. Marginalizing women's ability to lead and speak up as experts is one of the big ones. Just a while hornet's nest of issues waiting potential employees who don't see it coming until it's too late. They often ask employees to work extra -- their weekends, after hours, 80-100hrs a week. If you try to take vacation to make up for the overwork, they penalize and ostracize you.

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Pros

Solid company in terms of growth

Cons

Startup culture for a big company

1.0
Jun 30, 2026
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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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