Workday reviews

3.5

59% would recommend to a friend

(4,554 total reviews)
avatar

Aneel Bhusri

61% approve of CEO

42% positive business outlook

Workday has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 4,554 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Workday employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

5K reviews
2.0
Jul 6, 2019

More hype than great

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

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.

1.0
May 13, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- The CEO is really smart and awesome - It's a big american company with an office in Dublin, Ireland so you can have the chance to get in touch with people with all around the world. - The view from the 6th floor of the building is nice and also the snack program and the employees clubs are a nice bonus to make your day more enjoyable. - Most colleague are friendly and there is a lot of flexibility in managing your time

Cons

- The CEO has stopped to oversee the hiring a long time ago, and the quality upper and lower management of the Dublin office is really poor (with very limited exception like Chris Byrne) - Tons of big policies and procedure for everything, with several levels of approval. They clearly don't trust their employees and they want to get managers involved in every decision, even the technical ones. Most of the policy are so generic that basically leaves a huge discretionary power in the hands of a really poor management. - The company is always saying that they care about you, but it's more true if you are a manager. We are all equal only when it comes to the snack program or a spot in the car park. If you are a individual contributor, you are just a resource to be allocated the a project/team every few months/weeks as they like. - The structure is very vertical, with a manager every 3/4 people and multiple managers from different organizations with different okr, policy, procedures to handle a single team. - They call the management "leadership", but it's just a word, they are not leading anything, they are not providing example, guidance, mentoring or coaching. They only care about their goals/okr/objectives and not about you or your career. They tell you that you career is in your hands, and they mean it, literally since they cannot care less. - There are no quantitative goals to measure your contributions/productivity and no clear path/checklist to get a promotion. It's only based on your ability to sell yourself with smoke and mirrors and become friends of the upper management and not with actual quality deliverables to the customers. - They are running a career check-in every year as an HR compliance exercise, but it's just a one way presentation. First you present you achievement, than you will be given the management review, unrelated to your presentation and with compensation/promotion package predetermined . - If you are already a good friends of the upper management, you can be promoted every 6/12 months, without having to prove anything and you can also get you friend and family hired in senior roles. They call this connections, and they really value it, but I prefer to use another name. - If you have an irish passport, you will get probably an higher level in the company given the same level of experience in the industry, so apply for one before joining the company. They are proud of having a mix of people from all around the world in the Dublin office, but almost all of them are individual contributor. Probably in Ireland there are a lot of managers and very few developer, tester, analyst, etc. It's clearly a coincidence. - There is a toxic culture where you are forced to comply and pretend that everything is awesome, if you try to point out a problem, you will become the problem since you clearly do not understand their magnific work and instead of fixing the problem, they will focus on explaining to you why you are wrong. - If you are unlucky enough to work with xpresso for 1-2 years, your career in the real word is ended. They believe they have created (acquired) a powerful proprietary language/system that it's ten of years ahead of everything. Even if it's an interesting technical solution, it's clearly limited and there is no proper tooling to support the code development. There is a huge ecosystem of plugins written by devs in their spare time to improve the gaps of the language, because the company does not care to have the xo team spend time to improve the dev experience. They are just totally blind and full of themselves

3.0
Jun 17, 2017

WORST Manager EVER

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great workspace, employees are friendly, theres a lot that goes on in relation to events / parties.

Cons

I enjoyed almost everything about Workday, however I had one of the worst managers in my whole life. A manager that would insult people behind their back and laugh with them in their face. Every idea that i suggested or brought forward, this manager ignored and neglected them. Favoritism was my managers core value. Only trusted and gave opportunities to favorites. Finally the experience i had with my manager went from professional to personal. This person had very unfair way of treating me.

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Glassdoor has 5,118 Workday reviews submitted anonymously by Workday employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Workday is right for you.