Workday Reviews

Pros

Workday is an amazing company and has really invested in their employees. There are lots of benefits such as exercise studio, free snacks, fitness expenses etc. but that isn't really what makes the place great. There are more than 1200 employees now, but it still feels like a small company as everyone is so friendly. The senior leadership in the Dublin office is great, and you really feel like they care. This is the... least hierarchal place I've ever worked - managers and directors are amazing and usually great craic. They make a real effort at diversity and inclusion, and there are always tonnes of charity events and programmes to help the local community. There's a lot of fun in the office, with lots of opportunities to make friends by joining book clubs, running clubs etc. Workday is killing it this year - #1 Best Place to Work in Ireland, #3 in Europe, winner of Best Graduate Employer in Ireland.

Cons

Workday is an American tech company so it's unsurprising that a lot of colleagues are based in the US, but there is the usual feeling of the US team looking at Dublin like it is a bit of a backwater. Accommodations are made for meetings etc with the West Coast, but a lot of the VPs seem totally culturally unaware about international people in the team, and it feels like recognition and promotion often go to... colleagues based in the HQ in California rather than in EMEA.

Advice to Management

Amazing place to work, but better cultural awareness around the EMEA team would create a more solid team environment. European people don't usually ask a lot of questions in meeting. That's not through a lack of engagement, but because we understand presentations just fine without additional explanations. At a recent summit a C-suite leader referred to the EMEA team as the 'offshore team' - that's not how we see... ourselves!

Pros

Good work life balance for some teams. Great benefits Good salaries Good snacks program

Cons

People: Some nice people, some very arrogant and toxic people, depending on which team you join. Technology: The core application is a monolithic one, old technology for the teams working in core application, except for some new teams that are using modern technologies. They are trying to update technologies used, but this is moving very slowly. If you end up with working in the monolithic app you will... experience all the drawbacks of a monolithic application, like: - Massive code base that is really hard to understand, - Hundreds of developers working in the same code base, - Pipeline blocked most of the time, - Tricky to debug, takes some time, - Poor test coverage, - Bugs can slip out easily, etc… If you will work with XO, their proprietary language, not that bad as a concept, but it's not done in developer friendly way, it has pros and cons. XO Pros is that it helps building features quickly. XO Cons: Takes lots of time to learn it. It limits your thinking to the capabilities it has, which is limited compared to any other language. Tools around it is not great, for example the code review tool is not good. The automation framework that is done on top of it is very bad to work on as well. The UI for the development is not developer friendly, which is basically inside the browser and UI based. People - details Managers hell: I had bad luck and joined 2 different teams in which I didn't have a good time over there. I have seen very poor soft skills, especially communication skills among senior people, and managers, within my team, i didn’t find respect, i wasn’t valued, i didn’t find psychological safety which is very important important for a successful team, Instead I found pointing fingers, blaming, undermining others. I have worked with 2 managers. 1st one was fake, too formal, a kind of person who gives too many instructions which he doesn't follow half of them. A kind of manager that you feel the 1-1 meeting is something you need to prepare and worry about. He used a google doc to track what we say and ask about it next time, which gave the meeting the formality style, which is not good for 1 to 1 meetings, he had very poor communication skills, he would joke about people's mistakes rather than trying to give constructive feedback. Second manager was worse, he looked very nice, funny, friendly, until any mistake happens, or anything that he doesn't like. He turns to the other face, aggressive communication style, blaming, comparing to others. All the things that it is not recommended for professional communication, he was doing it. he has offensive and harsh communication style, that you would feel offended after. Some of our meetings would turn into arguments, shouting, blaming game and whose fault it is. After some time working with this manager i would go to work, feel anxious all the time just thinking that I could have done something wrong that would result of him talking to me in un -pleasant way. Working under these 2 managers in Workday are considered to me the worst time in my life, which turned my hope of working in a great place fades and turns into a nightmare. Disrespect and exclusion Being in these 2 teams, I didn’t feel much inclusion and respect, i was different in terms that I don't like going out to their outings, I don’t like parties or fun the way they see it. I don’t like drinking, I don't talk much about other things than work. I was looked at like I am weird. The culture they advertise is talking about things like value employee, and inclusion. But the true and actual culture is different. There isn’t much stress on applying this culture. I was advised by my manager to try to mingle more and talk more about any nonsense, and to go out with the team for drinks. He didn’t really understand my personality and was as if asking me to change my personality to fit more into the company. Once he mentioned that this how it is in Workday and this is what i need to do to fit the fun culture. He didn’t understand that every person have fun in a different way. Other than managers, i have seen senior and principals that doesn't respect others, talks about other in their backs, not patient, all of these things are missing from them are necessary for someone with such senior position, which makes me wonder how they were promoted. They were hard workers, have been in the company for some time, but that is not enough for someone to be promoted, senior person as well need to be a role model and be able to mentor others. Once one of the senior managers had an org meeting and he was bragging and joking about how much he curse, which just reminded me with high school time. I just wanted to tell him, come on, grow up - how immature!!!

Advice to Management

Not everyone that tells jokes and is laughing to others all the time fits to be manager, manager most important skill is to communicate, and to coach, if someone is very good in the product, or very organised and active but doesn't have these 2 important skills, he will end up with people running from his team and from the company. Another thing, not everyone that has been in the company for sometime and he wants... to be a manger you let him, without checking these 2 important skills. To promote people, they must show very good communication skills with people above him and people below him in level. The quality of people you hire is very important. In addition to good benefits, soft skills, communication skills are very important for a great work place Work more on applying the core values. Include respecting and accepting others as they are and not enforcing specific way of the values. Be more strict specifically to managers on enforcing the core values. Give more training about respecting others, how to give feedback, how to handle others' mistakes, coaching, leadership.

Pros

great company culture. Recommended to everyone

Cons

it is very expensive to live in dublin

Pros

Greate Culture, Awesome People, Nice Benefits and some opportunities to grow

Cons

Application Engineers works with a built-in language/framework.

Pros

Good perks ( equal to most tech companies) 27 days for holidays

Cons

No career progression, no proper recognition, communication all over the place, managers don't allow professional development on training level, use to be a horizontal hierarchy but completely changed

Pros

Friendly atmosphere Innovation is encouraged Great perks

Cons

High turnover of staff in some departments Don't appear to be able to compete with the bigger tech companies on staff retention

Pros

Great opportunity Amazing environments Free coffee

Cons

Salary is low but get more benefits

Pros

Fruits in the cafeteria. Clean and neat office space. Work life balance. IT help-desk is very helpful and efficient.

Cons

First of all "Great place to work" gimmick is mainly a BS. Company is not on par in terms of benefits with other large tech companies around (like Google, FB or MS). Culture and work conditions varies largely depending on the department and team you are working at. I've seen examples when the whole teams were leaving their jobs in a course of less than 1 year. It's just shows an example how extremely unhappy people... can be at the "Best place to work". The sad part is that nothing was done on the higher management side to correct the situation. Instead managers report how everything is "great", "positive" and "amazing" which totally contradicts reality. So depending on department/team it can be a good (I wouldn't call it great still) or bad to terrible place to work. Therefore if you are looking to join Workday ignore this "Best place to work" - it really means nothing, it's just a job at an average company nothing more. Also I should note that there is a lot of hypocrisy on different levels. On the lowest level managers and recruiters can lie straight in the people's face and give them fake promises (while knowing they are fake). On the company level good example is that company claims that they promote internal mobility (and there are a lot of talks about it from HR and management) but in reality recently they changed rules increasing minimum required length of stay in the team before people can transfer to another team. Before you could transfer after 1 year of work, now you have to stay at least 1.5 year. Also transferring process isn't simple: they don't make a difference between internal and external candidates. Which means internal candidate would have to go through the same set of interviews as external. So if you were thinking that you can get to random team in Workday and hope that you will be able to transfer to a better team/project/department later you should understand that: 1. once you are in you are locked (in potentially horrible place) for 1.5 years 2. even after 1.5 years passed you will have to go through the same process as if you were applying for the job externally. Point 2 means that being in Workday gives you no advantage in getting to a good team/project over the external candidate. Paint 1 means that you would have a DISADVANTAGE over external candidates b/c you would be locked for 1.5 years and people from outside are not. Given the above: 1. Be VERY careful when applying for the job. Best if you know someone who works in that team or department and can tell you how things are. 2. Don't trust what recruiters say. 3. Remember that it would be more beneficial waiting for a better job opening to come up rather than applying to a random job opening in Workday. Special notes about technologies: Workday has a proprietary piece of something (full of bugs and unpredictable behavior) named Xpresso (XO). They call it "programming language" but it's really not. It is some sort of "platform" where App Developers define business logic by clicking checkboxes and picking items in the listboxes in the web browser (that's correct no coding involved). For the whole day... Every day! Read the other reviews - people described it well there. Basically if you spend couple of years in such project (while not doing any real software engineering on a side) you will hardly be able to call yourself a software engineer and therefore would not be qualified for an adequate position in the market. Read the restrictions on transferring to another team above and you can see that it's a dead end if you don't escape early.

Advice to Management

1. Align to the core values, not just claim them. 2. Look at the attrition rates across departments (it's easily measurable metric) and start investigating what is happening in departments with high attrition rate. Based on that start taking actions. Some directors and managers would have to be fired I'm sure. 3. Technology wise: get rid of Xpresso. Yes I know a lot of things dependent on it but just like it... makes your people noncompetitive in the market it will make Workday noncompetitive. It's already visible that "developing" using XO takes more man-hours (i.e. more expensive) than developing using programming languages. The more XO apps produced every day the higher cost it would be to get rid of it later. Kill XO before XO killed Workday.