Workday Applications Developer I reviews

Workday’s App dev teams are the product engineering teams and they build the app using a propriety 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.

-Xpresso is the death of a career. Some internal initiatives are evidence to how unsuccessful Xpresso is and efforts to "revitalize" the language. Application developers hate it and other engineers openly mock the language that developers have to use. - Underpaid. Even after "market adjustments," application developers are underpaid compared to the industry standard. If you're going to make developers learn a new language and trap them to a poorly built construct, at least compensate them appropriately in return. - There's no concept of exploring new technologies as an application developer. Sure you can learn new technologies within Workday, but again they're all Workday specific that are not transferrable in any way. Workday only makes developers better for Workday, not in general.