Workday

Fruits in the cafeteria. Clean and neat office space. Work-life balance. IT help-desk is very helpful and efficient.

First of all, the "Great place to work" gimmick is mainly BS. The company is not on par in terms of benefits with other large tech companies around, like Google, FB, or MS.

Culture and work conditions vary largely depending on the department and team you are working at. I've seen examples where whole teams were leaving their jobs in the course of less than 1 year. This just shows an example of how extremely unhappy people can be at the "Best place to work". The sad part is that nothing was done on the higher management side to correct the situation. Instead, managers report how everything is "great", "positive", and "amazing", which totally contradicts reality. So, depending on the department/team, it can be a good (I wouldn't call it great still) or a bad to terrible place to work.

Therefore, if you are looking to join Workday, ignore this "Best place to work" – it really means nothing; it's just a job at an average company, nothing more.

Also, I should note that there is a lot of hypocrisy on different levels. On the lowest level, managers and recruiters can lie straight to people's faces and give them fake promises (while knowing they are fake).

On the company level, a good example is that the company claims that they promote internal mobility (and there are a lot of talks about it from HR and management), but in reality, they recently changed the rules, increasing the minimum required length of stay in the team before people can transfer to another team. Before, you could transfer after 1 year of work; now, you have to stay at least 1.5 years.

Also, the transferring process isn't simple: they don't make a difference between internal and external candidates. Which means an internal candidate would have to go through the same set of interviews as an external one.

So if you were thinking that you can get to a random team in Workday and hope that you will be able to transfer to a better team/project/department later, you should understand that:

1. Once you are in, you are locked (in a potentially horrible place) for 1.5 years.
2. Even after 1.5 years have passed, you will have to go through the same process as if you were applying for the job externally.

Point 2 means that being in Workday gives you no advantage in getting to a good team/project over an external candidate.

Point 1 means that you would have a DISADVANTAGE over external candidates because you would be locked for 1.5 years, and people from outside are not.

Given the above:

1. Be VERY careful when applying for the job. Best if you know someone who works in that team or department and can tell you how things are.
2. Don't trust what recruiters say.
3. Remember that it would be more beneficial waiting for a better job opening to come up rather than applying to a random job opening in Workday.

Special notes about technologies:

Workday has a proprietary piece of something (full of bugs and unpredictable behavior) named Xpresso (XO). They call it a "programming language", but it's really not. It is some sort of "platform" where App Developers define business logic by clicking checkboxes and picking items in the listboxes in the web browser (that's correct, no coding involved). For the whole day... Every day!

Read the other reviews – people described it well there. Basically, if you spend a couple of years in such a project (while not doing any real software engineering on the side), you will hardly be able to call yourself a software engineer and therefore would not be qualified for an adequate position in the market. Read the restrictions on transferring to another team above, and you can see that it's a dead end if you don't escape early.

1. Align to the core values, not just claim them.

2. Look at the attrition rates across departments (it's an easily measurable metric) and start investigating what is happening in departments with high attrition rates. Based on that, start taking actions. Some directors and managers would have to be fired, I'm sure.

3. Technology-wise: get rid of Xpresso. Yes, I know a lot of things are dependent on it, but just as it makes your people non-competitive in the market, it will make Workday non-competitive. It's already visible that "developing" using XO takes more man-hours (i.e., more expensive) than developing using programming languages. The more XO apps produced every day, the higher the cost it would be to get rid of it later. Kill XO before XO kills Workday.