Citrix jobs are the rates falling?

DATE: May 5th 2010

In the good old days, getting a role requiring Citrix skills was easy. I'd usually get a telephone call from a recruitment agency.

"We have a role for a Consultant, are you interested?", the Agent would say,

"What are you paying a day?", I'd reply,

"XXX a day plus expenses", the agent would reply,

"Yeah, that's great, count me in", I'd reply,

"OK, leave it with me, I'll see what I can do" and that was the end of the phone call.

Half an hour later, the agent would phone back and say something along the lines of,

"You got the job, can you be at YYY company on Monday morning, I'll send you contact details by email."

This wasn't just an isolated case, I never really had to endure face to face interviews early on in my career with Citrix technologies. I'd either get a role just by my CV (Resume) alone or do a brief telephone interview and that was it, the role was mine.

Big changes

The good days couldn't last and suddenly having to attend interviews became the norm, sometimes having to do a couple of face to face interviews for a role, in front of a panel of senior employees was a pre-requisite.

I started to experience what it was like not getting some roles I'd applied for and this rejection initially was quite painful. I just couldn't pick and choose the roles I wanted, other people, that is the recruiters would do that, as they had more choice of people to pick from.

Everyone come and join the party!

As more and more technical people started to embrace Citrix technologies, the next big change was the rates, where previously I could name my price, the rates started to fall and I'd have to take the price offered or negotiate hard to get a decent rate.

The high rates I'd experienced earlier on in my career, where never repeated whilst I worked soley with Citrix technologies, it's only when I became an architect (a Solutions Architect to be precise) did I start to re-live the high rates again.

Rates keep falling

The rates have kept falling because there's just too many people with Citrix skills and as economics dictates, when there's too much supply with little demand, the prices fall for those who are in supply.

Another reason for the decline, especially in the UK, was down to an influx of migrant workers who settled here over the past decade from places such as Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India to name a few.

These workers included Citrix experts who because of the weaker currency they'd left behind (which wasn't as strong as the UK pound), became mesmerised by what they believed was a good rate to do the jobs on offer, to the detriment of the existing Citrix experts.

Thereby bidding to do projects at a substantially lower cost which employers cottoned onto quickly, dropping what they were offering for projects in return.

Mainstream vs Niche

Citrix technology has also become mainstream and isn't a niche player anymore. It's grown substantially and so have the experts who profess to work with it's technologies.

When it was a niche technology it was very difficult to find people skilled in it to do projects and as such the rates on offer were very high but now it's very common and as such many people have jumped on the boat, looking for opportunity.

High end roles are still a good prospect, right?

Designing solutions has also taken a knock, as many Solutions Architects without a deep understanding can develop Citrix designs with ease. Which can then be outsourced to places like India and the detailed designs developed by techie specialists, a minimal cost.

The actual grunt work of putting the solution together by building the servers can then be done by a few engineers or automated. The racking of servers and initial configurations can be done by the company who supplies the servers.

Years ago, I would have been involved in nearly all of the stages from design to actually racking and building the servers but now so much of it can be done without an 'out and out' expert, it comes pretty close to child's play.

The design stage is pretty straightforward and I see many roles which incorporate it as part of a wider Solutions Architect role. But unless you understand (at a high level) all the technologies involved from end to end, knowing just Citrix isn't going to get you the Architects role.

Solution Architects look at layers from the presentation layer to the application layer, data access layer down to the data storage layer. Citrix technologies tend to fit into the presentation layer and thus being a single layer in a multi-layer solution, knowledge of how the other layers are utilised is also required to be successful.

This is why Solution Architects get paid well because they can give you the complete solution (end to end) using multiple technologies instead of just one aspect of it, as I would have done when I was only skilled in one technology.

If you still don't believe me how much the rates have fallen by, well a few years ago you could easily get 500 a day, now check the job boards and see what's available? Likewise with permanent roles, these have fallen from 60k down to about 35k but the architect roles such as the Solutions Architect, the rates have remained pretty static.