Quote:
Originally Posted by zx10guy
I've never interviewed with Palo Alto. I have with Cisco twice. It's no cake walk. Both times was for a sales engineer position. First round I was in a room with 3 CCIEs that were throwing technical questions at me for 1.5 hours. I had to know all the various Cisco protocols forwards and backwards. And they made me walk through a network diagram discussing how spanning tree would select the best path through switches connected together with multiple physical connections.
The second job opportunity with Cisco was even worse. I had interviewed with I think 7 or so CCIEs all individually. With one of them being a Cisco fellow who is someone that is so key in the company that as long as Cisco is a company this guy will have a job. The technical interviews were all intense which went over everything from route, switch, some firewall, SDN, wireless, and architectural designing. The worst was with the Cisco fellow where he threw up a rectangle on the board which represented a building and he would rapid fire questions at me on how I would design a network and then make adjustments on the fly to see how fast I think on my feet. After an 1.5 hours of that, I was ready to crawl in a hole and take a nap.
If you're going to go after Cisco, you'll be best served by obtaining a CCNA first to be a substitute for experience. Also, Cisco is going through some massive restructuring right now. I know this because I interface with them on a regular basis with my current job.
|
1. I never said it would be easy, just that they're big enough and flexible enough to take chances on people - startups may not due to urgent deadlines and a need to produce to stay afloat.
2. CCNA and other Cisco certs would definitely help not just at Cisco but any company - Cisco certs are sort of the gold standard for cybersecurity and networks. I think something like 80% of the industry goes off of Cisco certs, I could be wrong on that but yeah.