Citrix Systems|Citrix Reviews

Pros

Flexible, rewarding, great set of complementary products

Cons

No cons at this time

Advice to Senior Management

communicate from the top all the way down.

Pros

Innovation encouraged. Beautiful facilities. Good benefits.

Cons

Careers of individual contributors stagnate. Recruits outside talent for many professional and management level positions.

Pros

Good pay, good bonuses, strong hardware to work with.

Cons

some managers have self-esteeem issues

Advice to Senior Management

Employees ARE the company!

Pros

Employee friendly
Good work life balance

Cons

Strategically they need to align themselves as they face big competitors like VMWare

Advice to Senior Management

They are on the right track with Xendesktop. They should continue doing the same thing

Pros

Excellent work culture, open communication

Cons

Growth opportunity could be improved

Pros

flexible work environment and byoc

Cons

pay is not up to par with industry

Pros

Amazing career opportunities, coupled with outstanding career training and a very flexible schedule. Citrix is a huge proponent of workshifting - the ability to work anywhere at anytime, and fully supports senior level positions for telecommuters and home office workers. The free snacks, drinks, latte machine, and killer culture are pretty nice as well.

Cons

There's not much to share here. It's one of the best work experiences I've ever had. The only downside I could offer is that there's not a vaster selection of free snacks (small gripe, I know).

Advice to Senior Management

You guys do a fantastic job. My only advice is to get out to some of the division offices more often and sit down with folks at all levels. Share your vision with these folks, and listen to what they have to say. Some of the best ideas come from the least likely sources.

Pros

Great pay, nice quarterly bonuses for sr. level individual contributors and above, superb executive team.

Cons

Middle management has improved but is still mostly technically incompetent and lacks accountability. There is still a strong push to use outsourcing in India/China even though most efforts have not proven successful and costs to do so are likely increasing. Promotions are still scarce but raises have returned to somewhat normal in the past couple of years. The review system does not reward top performers enough and does not hold completely incompetent/lazy contributors accountable.

Advice to Senior Management

There has been a strong push towards culture change lately in regards to innovation, design, and scalability. If this goal is truly desirable, then change needs to happen. The correct behavior that is needed for this change is being punished rather than rewarded and the opposite is true for people that are sticking with the status quo.

Look out for your top performers leaving Fort Lauderdale in the next few years. The bad housing market that kept many from leaving are no longer waiting patiently for the market to return. Many are realizing that the housing market is not coming back anytime soon and are considering foreclosing or doing a short sale. These people are not likely moving to another Citrix location..

Pros

Flexible work hours. Supervisors do not micromanage you, and you can even come in late if you have to. Ability to bring your own computer to work.

Cons

Very little chance for advancement unless someone is fired or resigns.

Advice to Senior Management

Improve communication and direction to employees

Pros

Great people, superb team ethos, good work life balance with understanding managers. You can use all the Citrix tech to work from home.
Really fun place to work
Interesting technology that is growing rapidly
Some mangers are excellent and really push their staff on to great things. If you're good enough you will do well.
Chance to learn lots of new tech
No one seemed to grumble about money, including me, so pay was obviously good!

Cons

HR inept! Engineering should ditch the corporate HR structure and hire it's own HR people.
Limited chances for promotion in engineering, it's easy to drift and get unmotivated and hard to move projects. Some departments even had grades removed at some levelsmaking it even harder (although that wasn't the line trotted out by HR...)
They need people to move around far more within engineering, it's all too easy to get stuck on one project.
Some people seem to get promoted simple by making themsleves very visable. The Citrix way seems to be that once people are visable they will become the 'go to' men which means the myth gets perpetuated at the expense of not giving others the chance to shine. In some parts (and I stress just some) parts of engineering you need to be in the clique to get ahead.
Engineering is very disorganised with poor product specs and CR's put in by Product Managers on a whim. Every release seems to be a rush with lots of last minute bugs and changes followed by the promise that it wouldn't happen again next time. It nearly always did. It seems they'd rather ship on time than delay and fix things.
Very little diversity in the workforce which may explain why the culture in enginnering was so slow to change.

Advice to Senior Management

Get Engineering sorted out and more efficient. The people are fantastic and work super hard, the process is broken.
Keep people on their toes a bit more - it's far too easy to drift along.
Give people clear goals for promotion. Ditch the rubbish goals system and just tell people what they need to get done to move ahead.