Pros
This is probably the best description of Workday: "This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay." Workday does have a lot of shiny pieces. Workday was originally designed by some very smart people and it can survive a lot of abuse. The core HCM app is still very good comparing to the competitors. The company can still deliver high customer satisfaction. There is reasonable diversity in the workplace. Workdays top people - Dave and Aneel - are very well known in the industry and have produced very impressive returns for the investors. The offices are nice and shiny too.
Cons
Here comes the other side. All these shiny pieces are held by feet of clay. It's like eating sausages - for most people it's better not to know how they are made ... Workday technology is getting old, there are more and more short cuts in the processes. The HR practices are really bad. There are people who get away with anything because they are friends of someone or used to work together. Meanwhile other people are trying hard but getting fired. It looks just so unfair and demoralizing and the top management seems to be doing nothing about introducing merit based reviews and restrict cliques and nepotism. Workday has never made any profit selling its products and it's very inefficient. We have spent years on useless projects and built whole data centers sitting idle for years - again, no accountability or personal responsibility. Most of our developers using Xpresso are going to lose their professional skills because that languages is so "different" ... Now we are into frankensoft business buying and trying to integrate startups ... Workday is not the top dog in ERP space anymore. Yes, it's HCM product is still good and has some unique advantages. But so it has weaknesses and the ratio is getting worse. And our FIN products - the future will tell when they will be ready. The best days are clearly behind and it's sinking.
