Citrix engineering is completely ridiculous and run by a bunch of sycophantic morons. I'm not sure who does the work there anymore. Any company in technology that wants to survive needs to keep filling the tank instead of milking the cow. They completely devalued technical skill and promoted "skills" such as sitting in boring meetings, writing bullshit status reports that no one reads, and going to the Green Brier. Getting rid of 75% of them would be a good start but it's probably too late. I'd offer that service free of charge.
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Agree with Anonymous195200 for the most part. Too much fat. At the same time, some of the best minds in Citrix came from the H1-B route. Would love to hire American students out of college. Problem is most of them don't make it past CS101 in the first year of college and go pursue dance, history and drama, until they realize in their early 30s that they were screwing around the last 10 yrs - too late by then.
Any crap person seem to easily get into the company if they are known to the power centric managers. Sometimes they just have to be beautiful enough. No brains required to work there.
Hmmm. Easy. I would change the "buddy system." There are too many people working at Citrix that were hired because they"re friends with the hiring manager. I know this happens at all companies - all over - all the time. But that doesn't make it right and it's a virus at Citrix. What this behavior does is create an influx of unqualified employees. Who then have a hard time learning, adapting and applying. Therefore, business stalls to get this person up to speed and the company suffers.
Anyone who has worked at Citrix knows someone whose previous job was a waiter, softball coach, dental hygienist ... WHAT? Fast forward to circa 2015 they"re now VP of XYZ, Senior Director of XYZ ... WHAT?
So yeah, the buddy system has caused Citrix to unfortunately be in the position that they're in today. I love Citrix as a company, and I love working at Citrix. So on November 17 let's see who the buddy system saves
Champion a culture that puts focus on building strong, efficient, creative teams. Teams are how companies win. Smaller approval groups. It's lean and generates more innovative results. Eliminate fear. Remember, fear kills creativity. Help people work through fear. This isn't therapy, it's business in 2015. Help people overcome this to both develop them and move the business at hand along. Take a zero tolerance policy around open negative talk. Especially in groups. Negativity is contagious and it's also limiting. Choose the opposite. No meetings without a goal. No goal? Then no meeting necessary.
fire 2/3 of the developers. the absolute crap produced by some of the staff and principle developers there is beyond believe, and don't even get me started on the imported juniors. it's tragically comical in fact. don't let me get into details. also fire 3/4 of useless management. did you know that at one time there was a director with 1 manager reporting to him, said manager in turn had 1 test engineer reporting to him. that's $500K in salary with the most vertical structure I have ever seen; a job that could have easily been done by ONE person for $75K. the company is one huge clique of mediocrity protecting each others asses. bunch of H1B's protected by "racial" solidarity. brown nosing like you wouldn't believe. both times i worked there i was absolutely amazed how the company manages to stay afloat.
Go private a freakin sap!! Dump CEO and Elliot.
Cut back to the core XD and XA products, maybe keep SF and NS. Make sensible aquisitions that bolster those products and not buying 3rd rate companies that don't add any value to core business.
Burn the fat. Too many people. Too less work. Keeps them focussed only on each other's destruction within the leadership team.
Go private. ASAP.
Be lean. Forget VDI as the primary cow, and pay more attention to the cloud (that's where the future and riches really are - Citrix didn't see the paradigm shift coming). Don't rely too much on mobile management. Hell, if Citrix could go private, the better. Engineering in general, and software in particular, these are not things that can guarantee profits at every quarter. These endeavours require a lot of risk and up-front costs - they require a decade-long view, not just a quarter-to-quarter view.
Replace the board and CEO with a team that understands what Mark wrote in his final mail to all employees. They obviously didn't agree.
Fire CEO