Fortinet Reviews

I worked for the company from 2017-2021 as a senior project manager. I am going to talk about the supervisor of the Top-3 project management team, for her lack of leadership, her unprofessional behaviour at the workplace and her unfair treatment towards team members. The supervisor expects the project managers to come up with technical solutions and drive the solutions through the development groups to achieve sometimes unrealistic timelines. Failing of doing so, the project manager is labelled with lack of technical competency or lack of critical analytical capability. Many times, despite team members’ escalation, throughout the process, aside from stating the demand of the original unrealistic timeline and scope and blaming project managers for not coming up with a technical solution, she added no value. The supervisor has a hard time letting her people run their projects without micro-managing. Planning and executing a project with a measured cadence are often viewed as a lack of sense of urgency. The group doesn’t have a clearly defined project governance model and project management process to follow. This has resulted in team members constantly in a firefighting mode without clear direction and support. In my 20+ years of professional career working in complex high-tech environments, I have never experienced an incompetent leader like her.  This sentiment is echoed by other key Project Managers leaving the group due to her low level of leadership. The attrition rate of the team is constantly higher than 20% in the past 7 years. Aside from her poor leadership capability, what really bothered me was her unprofessional behaviour at the workplace towards the team members. Public shaming of her subordinators without ground really shocked me. It’s disappointing to see a senior leader treating her employees in this discriminatory manner. In the end, HR, unsurprisingly, sided with the management team. My advice, do not work for this company.

I worked at Fortinet for over 4 years. I wish I had better things to say, but I do not. I generally agree with the points made by other reviewers about the language biases, archaic methods, and mismanagement. If you are reading this and wondering whether you should accept an offer from Fortinet ... my suggestion is: Don't (especially if you are entry level or junior). With the exception of very (and I stress *very*) few teams, Fortinet does not provide good mentorship nor teach you industry practices that will develop your engineering skills. On the contrary, it may even hinder your development as an engineer. Upper-management sees you as numbers that fill spots. They will reorg you with very little notice (less than a week) and provide no reason for it. If you want to move laterally, animosity among teams and general disapproval from the upper management will often result in a rejected request. Product management is a mess: there is little cohesion between product management and the engineering departments. Team management is unprofessional. I have seen the extremes of micromanagement to no management at all. Managers may neglect communication with their own team members: from a month all the way to six months (!?) without a word. From all the teams I have been in and interacted with, I would say 95% of them do not follow most engineering best practices: no designing, no testing, no software development lifecycle in place, little communication, and little investment in modern software development tools. Please take it with a grain of salt as all this above was either my own experience or of those that I witnessed while at this company.