Palo Alto Networks

There are lots of cons here, but I want to be honest, so here are all the pros too:

• Really good compensation
• Great perks like insurance, etc.
• Great kitchen and snacks
• Great tech stack; you can really learn the latest popular tools
• Challenging problems to solve, with a large amount of data to deal with
• Good future growth in the security business, and the company is indeed profitable.

Lack of transparency in performance expectation. It largely depends on whether a manager feels good about you or not, rather than looking at your actual work. If a manager feels bad about you, they criticize in extreme wording like, "Why are you 'always' late?" or "Why are you 'always' so slow?" which makes you feel it is unfair. Always? Not surprisingly, if you try to propose your achievements, you get backlashed. In order to maintain some sort of harmony, you stop speaking up for yourself. Eventually, those review meetings become one-way talks.

Whether or not you leaving the office late matters a lot. If you stay at the office late, your manager tends to think you are more hard-working, or at least fulfilled the "basic requirements." I see people coming to the office early in the morning, ending up staying late till 8 p.m. or later, and I sometimes see them get bored and start using their personal phones or watching videos while staying that late. This just makes no sense to me. If you feel you are done for today, why not just go home?

Lack of diversity. Some teams have a really monocultural composition due to the lack of diverse ethnicity/background. This is a direct result of internal referrals, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But if you don't handle carefully how it is implemented, you will get the result that the team is hiring more and more people of just the same background / same ethnicity.

The team's culture is largely determined by the manager. As with the lack of diversity, this trait is even polarized. Eventually, everyone is group-thinking. People are hesitant to give critical feedback to the leadership, i.e., the manager or supervisor.

Company-wise, the leadership in engineering is some kind of toxic and cannot really address critical concerns from the staff. For example, people challenged why the company Hackathon only awards those related to profitable company products. They asked if it shouldn't be a place to explore, to innovate, to do crazy things, to mingle and have fun. The director answered that our company was founded many years ago and we've come a long way since then. They said Hackathon is a place for fun, and there is no need to worry about awards; people should go mingle with others. What the hell? The fact that you award people only for profitable products conveys a clear message that that's the thing you consider "valuable" for Hackathon. And then you tell people that, well, you don't necessarily have to work on that! Don't you see almost every team is looking at the award criteria? Eventually, Hackathon is just a place to work overtime for your next project or part of your existing project. It's like a brainstorming for more profitable stuff, not much innovation or "go crazy" in there. For me, what the director said is a dishonest answer. You might disagree with me in some aspects, but what the director says gives you some idea of what the company culture looks like in many ways.