Workday

Still some hard-working engineers hanging on with the hopes of a culture turnaround. This company wouldn't last a day without them. Good people, but in roles they shouldn't be in.

When I joined, I only knew my manager. What used to be great was an almost flat hierarchy where all team members came together to solve problems, and the only person asking me for an update was my manager.

Now, even the Senior Director will reach you directly to ask you about something you worked on, and so will everybody in between. The direct, low-level managers are hand puppets that the Director and above control. These were mostly developers or automators who failed at becoming good engineers, or just didn't like the technology but somehow managed to score in interviews, or pull the right strings to become people managers, or can thank Workday's diversity goals (true story!).

All they do is look at dashboards and scoreboards and make sure no work goes unassigned. This is the primary reason for no career growth for aspiring engineers.

Meetings have gotten awful, with everyone trying to give their two cents and ultimately adding no real value to conversations. Every effort is to make yourself look good, because if you are not valuable, you become an easy scapegoat or get pushed aside.

Not a fun place anymore, and now just a race to get ahead of the other instead of working towards common goals and delivering features that wow.

We also have a new wave of product managers who really have no true sense of product ownership and need a lot of hand-holding and reliance on engineers to get their work done.

Still so much fat to cut.

Start with QA Managers, Application Dev Entry Level Managers this time that only appear to be working.

Real quality only at Senior Director level and above.

Still got some really good engineers, but they will leave at the first chance they get.