Workday

Good culture, fun co-workers. Great work-life balance. Stock is doing well, good ESPP plan, stock refreshers. The Generation Workday new grad program is a good way to make friends.

Workday’s app dev teams are the product engineering teams, and they build the app using a proprietary GUI-based language called Xpresso. The tools teams work on infrastructure, and they use traditional programming languages like Java and Scala. This review is about app dev only.

Hate to say it, but working in Xpresso is a very bad career move for engineers coming straight out of college. Unless you are proactive and work on side projects or continue to learn in your free time, you will forget your traditional coding skills. You will also not be exposed to industry-standard practices and tools by working in a proprietary stack. If you ever decide to leave, you'll likely struggle to find a traditional coding job. Workday probably has good retention rates for app devs not because app devs don't want to leave, but because they can't leave.

They tell you that you’ll still learn high-level concepts like design and OOP, but I don’t think it’s enough to make you a competent engineer. They also tell you that you can eventually transfer to a tools team, but it seems like you have to spend several years doing app dev first before you can switch.

Also, I think the salary for app devs is below industry average.

I'm not sure what they can do since Xpresso is a fundamental part of the tech stack. They're currently working on a replacement for Xpresso that's more similar to traditional programming languages, but it will still be proprietary, and it's unclear when it will be widely adopted.