It matters who you lay off. In the long run, it matters a lot. When they made decisions based on pay instead of performance, they rid the company of some of its best people. The lack of their contributions can already be felt and it will only become more pronounced in the future. Citrix leadership is about to learn just how foolish that move was.
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Despite the tapestry that has been woven from sh-t hitting the fan, the worst is yet to come. From our collective vantage point, we can start seeing how the rest of the house will burn down. This is far different from the layoffs and situation from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2018.
Back then we still had money, we were still acquiring customers, and we were somewhat innovating, even though growth had started to slow down quite a bit. Now, our CVAD (or XenApp/XenDesktop) market fiefdom is all but obliterated, especially in the cloud and F5 has won the reverse proxy/load balancing/cloud native application war, just like Vmware did with ESX. VPN/gateway isn’t much of a growth business, especially in the cloud, and I imagine customers will want better integrations. All other products are a distraction and a waste of time.
It seems like leadership has given up as well, in addition to being incompetent, and their main focus seems to be driving towards breaking things up as much as possible, selling them piecemeal, and taking whatever is left private in order to satisfy core demand from traditional markets like healthcare verticals.
In essence, the company is trying super hard to live up to the Shitrix moniker
If you’re still working at Citrix, do yourself a favor and start looking elsewhere asap, while you still have a modicum of control over the situation.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
When they made decisions based on pay instead of performance, this is what happens.
A lot of high performers got cut loose..
I'm a long time Platinum partner - not only are they chasing off or laying off the last remaining experienced employees they had, but they have completely given up on the partner community. Their channel teams were already thin and they just cut half of their technical resources. Your only hope at support from their Channel leadership is if you choose the CSP route. Totally incompetent leadership in their Channel that have no experience outside of CSP and honestly don't even seem to have a solid grasp there. (Scott somebody is a prime example - if you're a partner, you know who I'm talking about.) Plus with all the direct to customer business, who knows how long the CSP piece will last. Just no money to be made with Citrix anymore even if you spend far too much time jumping through the multiple hoops of their complex partner program. They are no longer a "Channel first" organization.
Citrix leadership does not care about their talent - that is more than obvious with this most recent layoff and I think it will be the nail in their coffin. Many people left in Q1, then more in Q2 but despite all the tremendous challenges this year many people chose to "tough it out" in the hopes that "next year will be better" only to be rewarded with a pink slip. Unbelievable that so many people were surprised by this. Citrix leadership thinks everyone is replaceable because none of the people at the top have actually been in the roles that build, sell and support their product. Citrix is the most dysfunctional place to work operationally, organizationally, structurally, etc and yet so many people have stuck with Citrix because they foolishly care about their role, their colleagues and they think if they just stick in there "things will get better" even though they never do. It hasn't been the same since the exit of Mark T. It's all about appeasing the stock market - not finding and retaining the best talent to build, sell and support the best technology. More now than ever that place is absolutely plagued with incompetent leadership at all levels with no one listening to or even asking the people who actually do the work. Sad to see it finally happening, but Game over
I can’t believe the number of people leaving that survived the layoffs. Lots of people giving notices. Citrix is screwed!
They have done this like 6 times already over the years. I dont think the ones in the top care about the future vs the now. They just want to cut cost and improve profits, period. Quality vs saving cost... Otherwise, they would be investing in Support, Engineering, etc. We are running thin in all of those teams, which affects quality and customer satisfaction.