Workday

Work-life balance is mostly good, unless your manager is strict about being in the office and not flexible when you have family commitments. Co-workers are supportive, hardworking, and nice, and oftentimes find ways to be successful and keep this company running in spite of the poor leadership.

There is still so much potential, with a good workforce, but this leadership will not get the company there. The company needs leaders who care to understand the technology and the business.

The CEO only speaks marketing language and doesn't inspire so that Workday can lead. In the town halls and all of his external interviews, he sounds like he's reading from prompts written by someone to make him try to sound technically competent (or maybe he just asks AI).

He seems to lack curiosity on how the technology works, and also on what is possible with AI. This cascades to the rest of the leadership. He claims Workday is an AI company, but he doesn't seem to understand how. He gets the details wrong.

Then he hires his friends (they often publicly talk about hiring each other) into the President and leadership roles, and his friends hire their friends, while firing pretty competent leaders, especially the strong women leaders. Any glance at the friendship circle and you can see their limited experience in building enterprise services or any understanding of HR, Finance, and AI together.

What we see is lack of tech competence paired with friendship nepotism from the top down. There are a lot of good people here, but Workday has become an uninspiring place with leaders who seem to only care about profits and optics. So if you're good friends, or have family members in the inner circle, you're safe at Workday to make decisions that may be detrimental to the future of the company.

Prioritize competence over friendships. Quit pushing out talented leaders (who also happen to be women) across all levels – people who actually understand AI with strong engineering backgrounds – to replace them with your friends. Take time to actually learn about AI and Workday technology so you can lead the company and also speak about it with confidence.