It was a great company to work for. Was
Pros
Snacks, pay, My old org was great and felt like one big team
Cons
No remote work, and yet can't get anything done in the office with all the chit chat. They seem to view infrastructure and build systems as a complete after thought and had between 1 and 2 engineers maintaining a build system used by 80+ teams! Leadership seems more focused on pumping out a worthless prototypes to get kudos from their manager than actually building the tools the organization needs to be successful. The entire duct tape and bandaid operation is held together by a tiny minority of very talented and hardworking engineers, without whom no team in the company would be able to release software (except the random outliers who never migrated off of some even older system, or acquisitions doing their own thing. Now they're cracking down hard on anyone who might potentially be enjoying their job or building anything worthwhile, by moving towards a fully data driven culture. It's a perfect recipe for justifying very stupid decisions. For example, should we automate our deployments? Anyone with the slightest experience, and even anyone who can manage to use google, will say "yes obviously". But that's not data driven! First we must do everything the wrong way, to gather data. Then when we eventually get around to doing it the right way, we'll have our measurements and can use data to make a decision. Except now you're maintaining a bunch of manually created prototype services that some brilliant person decided to let users onto (early feedback!). The users are now reliant on these system and the work to build long term solution becomes further and further away. It's a spec on the horizon until it disappears entirely. Now the org is asking why everything is taking so long, users are complaining that basic functionality such as "being able to log in" isn't working, Workday is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to have skilled engineers manually resetting passwords. Do we really need to run an experiment to know that we should follow general quality standards? Does no one understand that if you're 20% into a project and users are using 20% of the functionality, something is horribly horribly wrong? Maybe this stuff is not obvious to everyone or maybe they just shut up and come in. But believe it or not there are standard engineering practices that should be taken for granted. We shouldn't need data to understand automated tests are valuable We shouldn't need data to know automated processes are more efficient than having engineers clicking buttons. This isn't the half of it. I enjoyed most of my time there tho and it's highly dependent on what team you're on, your manager. I'd also stay away from "high investment" area like AI related work. They seem to be full of ladder climbers who will do things that hurt the company for their own gain. There is politics although I just write code and ignore it. I can't imagine anything more stupid than people who should all be on Team Workday actively working to harm each other. But I will say this. I'vd heard from new hires that it's actually pretty good and competent compared to what else out there. I had only worked with exceptional teams before this so I don't is a good baseline. it damn it does make me worry about bad it can get outside
