Juniper Networks

It used to be a place where very challenging engineering problems were attempted and solved. Not anymore. It is stuck in its own past and slowly withering away.

Decent pay: Salary could be good depending on which companies you compare with. Base salary is high, 401K match and ESPP are good. Be aware when comparing offers. No stock refreshes. If you get one (Top 20% of people or less), it will be peanuts (10% of base salary vesting over 4 years). Bonus percentage has been consistently going down. Do not assume you will get 100% of the bonus in your offer; these days you get around 50%.

Very Bad code base

This is code written with 20+ years of history. The same code base has seen patch works and reworks, with one Junos supporting all platforms without any modern development practices (not even a single automated unit test, only system-level regression tests which barely cover enough scenarios and hardly catch anything more granular than a feature not working). Because of one Junos supporting all platforms, the code base is extremely complex, and any change will have too many unforeseen/unknown side effects.

Bad people policies

No earned or defined PTOs. They claim (BS) during the offer that they are progressive and there are no limits on PTOs, and you can take as many as you want. In reality, two things happen due to unlimited PTO:

• You lose the ability to encash pay if you don't take enough leave.
• Every leave is a haggle with your manager. Most often, managers will not give 15-20 leaves per year, which was what it used to be before the policy.

If it was truly a positive intention, they could publish the average number of leaves an engineer is taking company-wide/per manager or say every engineer must take or a manager must ensure 18 leaves per year. No. They don't do such things; they are two-faced.

Take maternity or paternity leave, assume your bonus is 0. Doesn't policy from higher-ups avoid this? Again, paternity leave is a haggle.

No diversity

It's a very Indian, Chinese dominant company. In engineering, >70%. The majority of managers are Indian. Hardly any women, as the expectation to work late nights and weekends is very high.

Bad technical decisions

It takes years to do any decent-sized project due to an extremely complicated code base.

Couldn't catch up with Arista or at the least learn or copy from best practices, even though it happened right in front of Juniper.

Routing BU

Makes most of the cash. Good market share in ISP and Enterprise markets. Only reason the company is still around.

Switching BU

Stay away. Very bad software development. The Sr. Director manages this team. Poor work culture. No idea about what a modern data center needs are.

Security BU

Stay away. Constant layoffs. Doesn't make much revenue. Palo Alto Networks etc., will ensure this BU doesn't survive for long.