I don’t think it’s possible to deny that Workday has some positive attributes. I’m sure some people can go through their career there without a hitch. But I think I can safely say that if you want a great software engineering career, you need to do much better than working in the apps org at Workday. I think joining the Apps was the biggest mistake in my entire life, setting me back years in my professional development.
And it’s not just working in XpressO. At the end of my tenure I came to appreciate the things it did well. It’s more the lack of insight into any part of the technical stack, and the subpar technical leadership in Apps. Almost every manager I had during my tenure were Peoplesoft->Oracle->Workday, so several years away from the technical cutting edge. The lack of almost any technical know-how forces nonsense metrics to be the measure of an engineers ability, such as number of commits in a month, or how many comments were posted on a code review. Issues with my manager disappeared when I started committing near blank code to keep my number up, and started telling my peers to give me comments on my code reviews directly instead of on the code review tool. And I know for a fact it’s not just me who dealt with this.
Workday appears to hire three types of people in apps: college students who don’t know any better, older folk who don’t care anymore about being on the bleeding edge and just want a stable 9-5, and managers who worked at Peoplesoft at some point. Not exactly the ideal combination for what should be a high performance team.
