Like with any multinational there is no such thing as a perfect company and it's generally a case of what one is willing to put up with. I have been working with Workday close to 10 years and without doubt it is the most dysfunctional company I have worked for. The reason for this is also easily identifiable in that there is way too much middle management or "good" engineers promoted to managers which doesn't necessarily work in reality. Here are the major problems in the here and now:
1) Too many non-technical managers (that have read the scrum/agile handbook) in technical management positions.
2) The new pay structure and promotion criteria introduced for engineers was composed by a person in a BU that likely is functioning as a proper software house should be but doesn't reflect the reality of other BUs like AppDev in particular so it would be impossible to get promoted in some BUs.
3) Getting promoted really depends on the engineers and managers you are dealing with on your teams, so for example if you are proposing a good idea it likely will go nowhere, which is a problem created by management and is the norm in my opinion throughout the company.
4) Tech stack is awful in AppDev (Xpresso and Wats). It's just a web UI based point and click tool to create pages and forms. That's it! You don't have to deal with debuggers, compilers and actual programming languages. There are no data structures, algorithm, recursion, etc. No Unix/Linux or VMs and zero access to the DB. Management believe this to be the way forward.
5) Mandatory 50% attendance in the office, supposedly we need to be in person in order to do technical design, one wonders how we navigated COVID. Also spelunking is been all done virtually so the messaging is conflicting around all this. Again this is coming from executive level.
6) Projects that have being designed or implemented poorly can be worked on for 3-5 years and be cancelled a month or so prior to general release. This is a common theme within workday and is a problem with management again in my opinion in that there isn't a fail fast strategy in place for an ongoing project.
A company that is performing well can mask/absorb many problems. All the problems listed above is in my opinion are created by management. To quote Steve Jobs:
"In weak companies politics wins. In strong companies best ideas do"
Unfortunately, this is where Workday is at currently in my opinion. One hopes all the above changes soon.
