Workday Principal Software Development Engineer reviews

When I joined, I only knew my manager. What used to be great was an almost flat hierarchy where all team members came together to solve problems and the only person asking me for an update was my manager. Now even the Senior Director will reach you directly to ask you about something you worked on and so will everybody in between. The direct low level managers are hand puppets that the Director and above control. These were mostly developers or automators who failed at becoming good engineers OR just didn't like the technology but somehow managed to score in interviews OR pull the right strings to become people managers OR can thank Workday's diversity goals (true story!). All they do is look at dashboards, scoreboards and make sure no work goes unassigned. Primary reason for no career growth for aspiring engineers. Meetings have gotten awful with everyone trying to give their 2 cents and ultimately adding no real value to conversations. Every effort is to make yourself look good because if you are not valuable, you become an easy scapegoat or get pushed aside. Not a fun place anymore and now just a race to get ahead of the other instead of working towards common goals and delivering features that wow. We also have a new wave of product managers who really have no true sense of product ownership and need a lot of hand holding and reliance on engineers to get their work done.

- Constant reorgs means lost knowledge shifts in priority - Failure to retain key players - Some managers are toxic, don't care about their employees - Tech stack is a decade old - The customer needs an engineer to just configure the app - Failure to recognize the product has a bad reputation with customers