Workday Software Developer reviews

I had a great first couple years at this company although the XO backend made it very difficult to hire new developers and get things done. I enjoyed coming to work and solving problems. I hoped this would be the place I could work for many years to come. Then the re-orgs started. At first, it was once or twice a year. But for the past 2-3 years, it's been much more. The upper management has been disorganized. Every few months, they make a huge pivot. Great coworkers and managers have been laid off, even amazing managers getting laid off while on medical leave. I've been re-orged 4x in the past year. The first time, they wouldn't tell us our project was discontinued; we just woke up one Monday with an Outlook invite -- "Come to this meeting and work on this new project". Two months later, a manager finally admitted that my team's 5 years of work had been "de-prioritized." Managers have told me I was operating at a higher level for the past 4 years, and I met every one of the criteria on the promotion sheet. But even though I was put up for promotion, I never received it. I -- along with many others -- kept being shuffled to new departments and the new department says, "Sorry, we don't have enough slots and we already picked who is getting promoted." My new manager -- third one this year -- wants me to go up for a promotion again next year. I feel pretty dis-heartened about spending any more time on that. I am receiving less stock also, so I am effectively making less money than I was 5 years ago despite having much more responsibility. The most painful thing about this is the mis-match between how Workday management presents themselves and their actions. Workday has always called itself "the Workday family" and everyone is always doing things for charity and each other. But Management decisions are not held to any standard. Management decides to axe people's work with no explanation and then asks in a weekly survey how our wellbeing is. They decide to re-org us multiple times and then asks us if Workday is a "fun" place to work. We deal with financial stressors because of the decisions to not promote and pay fairly for our work -- and they ask on a scale of 0-10 how we'd recommend Workday to a friend.

In regards to positions that require an active security clearance, Workday lied about what was sold as a yearly clearance pay for holding and maintaining the clearance. Instead, it turned into something that "we absolutely do not have the budget for, but if employees work really hard then we might see about getting it to them next year if we think they deserve it". As a result, this ended up being a 15% pay deduction from what we were told. Workday acts like a collection of companies, with each team having its own hierarchy and bureaucracy to deal with. And you generally need to interact with other teams quite a bit.