I quit a job because of citrix. Exactly like you said, very noticeable latency. It ate into my productivity as a part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen.
> part of my mental energy was going into waiting for feedback to my actions to appear on screen
This should not be underestimated. I was in a situation like this and I though my short term memory stopped working. I forget what steps I already did because some actions took 10-15 seconds. I often switched to another task in the meantime and could not recollect the last step I did 10 seconds ago. Such delays are poison for for intellectual task where you would need concentration for.
There is no excuse for any modern device to make such pauses. It is also far too expensive for any company. The price for hardware is too low to let any user wait.
That's exactly it. Instead of tasks going "1, 2, 3" in my head, it was more like "1,...,1,...,1". I had to keep reloading every task into my working memory, with lots of brief pauses to think "did that click register", or "when I typed those words, was the context on that text box?". It's a truly torturous level of friction.
I didn’t deal with citrix but I did have to frequently SSH into cruise ships at a job some years ago. Goodness was the latency frustrating beyond belief. I didn’t last more than 6 months at that job.
Every single command input/key stroke could take 2-5+ seconds to display on my screen. Imagine trying to troubleshoot something critical in that type of environment. Luckily, I didn’t encounter anything truly critical, it was mostly maintenance tasks and such.
This should not be underestimated. I was in a situation like this and I though my short term memory stopped working. I forget what steps I already did because some actions took 10-15 seconds. I often switched to another task in the meantime and could not recollect the last step I did 10 seconds ago. Such delays are poison for for intellectual task where you would need concentration for.
There is no excuse for any modern device to make such pauses. It is also far too expensive for any company. The price for hardware is too low to let any user wait.