8 ms·

Everyone Hates Workday

86 points by gulced 2y ago

cs702 2y ago
> Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation. "It's like constantly being botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate." Workday's success is 100% explained by Arvind Narayanan's hypothesis that enterprise software is like baby clothing.[a] If I may quote him: "There are two types of baby outfits. The first is targeted at people buying gifts. It's irresistible on the rack. It has no fewer than 18 buttons. At least 3 people are needed to get a screaming baby into it. It's worn once, so you can send a photo to the gifter, then discarded. Other baby outfits are meant for parents. They’re marked "Easy On, Easy Off" or some such, and they really mean it. Zippers aren't easy enough so they fasten using MAGNETS. A busy parent (i.e. a parent) can change an outfit in 5 seconds, one handed, before rushing to work. The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do." HR managers, rank-and-file employees, and job applicants have never been Workday's customers. Its actual customers are the corporations seeking to quantify, manage, and control those users. Inevitably, it's them, the users, who find themselves "botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate." Couldn't have said it better! --- [a] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html
- Y_Y 2y ago
  I genuinely feel troubled by how accurate this is. When the little startup I was at got acquired by a megacorp we had to migrate a lot of tooling. It shocked me how different some of the software is in a philosophical sense. When you only have fifty people it's hard not to think about the plight of your code monkeys, even when you're getting schmoozed by a sales rep. Once you manage to put a couple of elevator rides and a secretary between the decision maker and the work-doer you can go full principal-agent and really take a big old dump into the air con in the programmers' sub-basement.
rco8786 2y ago
The Jira of HR tooling. Technically does everything you need it to, but leaves you sweaty and frustrated upon completion of even the simplest of tasks.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
From personal experience, I can attest that it is horrible. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
nutrie 2y ago
SAP, Salesforce and Workday came straight from the devil himself.
- cs702 2y ago
  Dammit, you made me spit my coffee out of laughter!
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    Me too! The obvious answer is Oracle's legal department.
- blantonl 2y ago
  Websphere also resides down low in the sweatshop of evil.
- Breza 2y ago
  I've gotten so fed up with Salesforce that I've taken to exporting data and reports using SOQL and displaying them in external dashboards.
jterrys 2y ago
Tools That I Fucking Hate Which I Never Thought I Would Use, Abuse, or Have To Learn: -Jira -Workday -SAP -Excel Corporate hell :'(
- steve1977 2y ago
  Why Excel? (fully agree with the rest)
  - kayo_20211030 2y ago
    Yeah. Excel is the bees. Fine hating on all the rest.
  - jterrys 2y ago
    Because I do far more work in excel than I do programming And I hate excel for it
- rco8786 2y ago
  > Excel This is like the single greatest piece of software to ever exist, and I mean that with 100% sincerity. I am baffled that you would include Excel in this list.
_benj 2y ago
> The answer, to use a term that any client of Workday could surely use, is POSIWID. This is a saying in systems thinking: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID), not what it fails to do. And the reality is that what Workday — and its many despised competitors — does for organizations is far more important than the anguish it causes everyone else. That’s the part that baffles me. There’s less crappy HR software out there, I’ve been in companies that use better software, but still workday seems like the default choice? The only explanation that comes to mind is that the people that buy workday don’t use it. There’s a similar issue with LMS and educational software. I’ve talked with a few teachers and professors and it’s usually common that they hate __ LMS (I’ve talked with some that love another) but teachers, except in rare cases, are not the ones that make software purchases decisions for their schools or districts. So if that’s the case all the workday needs to do to keep selling tons is to make pretty reports and tell executives how much money they can save by using their software instead of some more “hip” solution out there.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  Cost centers attract bad software, because buyers always prioritize "most checkboxes for lowest price" and ignore UX. Put another way, how many HR departments do you know that have a continual process improvement of their employee productivity? So why would vendors ever optimize UX?
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  > The only explanation that comes to mind is that the people that buy workday don’t use it. They probably have a good sales team inviting the CIO/HR boss/... to a golf course and convince them to buying. But those people then don't have to use it. For their own expenses etc. they got an assistant filing it and the reports they got printed out or otherwise summarized by somebody else.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rwmj 2y ago
We have to use Workday and everyone hates it with a passion. What baffles me is how disjoint it is. It's like the user interface was designed by several teams that were competing with each other. There's simply no rhyme or reason behind where things are. If you navigate away from something then good luck finding it again (you might though, find the same information presented in a different way in some other part of the UI). The forms and controls are like something from My First Website that you wrote in 1999. Since everyone in the company (including senior management) have to use it, I don't understand who signed off on it unless they left the company right afterwards.
baal80spam 2y ago
I have flashbacks from my previous job. Workday is PTSD-inducing.
veeti 2y ago
> Workday could conceivably build its own encrypted database of our information, across our different jobs and applications. When you leave Spotify to go work at Netflix, your profile could follow you, allowing you to more easily apply to the job. The multiplying powers of tech could scale to free us of our busy work, as promised. Maybe it's better they don't build such a shared profile, or soon hiring managers can see you've applied to 200 jobs and been rejected from all of them.
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  Couldn't they just define a standard resume file format, and let all of the Workday implementations support importing it?
  - blantonl 2y ago
    define a standard resume file format This right here is a 8 year project that would cost 1.2 billion dollars. And it would fail miserably before it got out of the requirements analysis phase.
    - CoastalCoder 2y ago
      Is this a comment on Workday's development pace? (I've never directly worked with them, so I can't tell if that's your point.)
      - blantonl 2y ago
        It’s a comment on enterprise software’s development pace
        TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
        And, if it were a standard, then once it was released every other vendor and group would write their own not-quite-compliant implementation :)
megadal 2y ago
It's strange how pervasive poor UI/UX (and poor software in general) is in enterprise software. I have never seen an ERP that looks and feels good to use (though I am sure some exist; I suspect Odoo falls in this category, but only because it's open source), they all just kind of exist as a means to an end, despite most ERPs being at least 50% of the chrome tabs an office worker keeps open all day. I wonder if this phenomenon serves as evidence that many decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes. Even marketing around most ERPs is designed this way: bulleted list of boxes checked off with almost zero real product previews
- blantonl 2y ago
  decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes Decision makers are simply a cog in the sales and marketing machine. 92.4517% of enterprise software decisions are driven by the relationship between the machine and decision maker without any regard to features, functionality, or fit.
  - Volundr 2y ago
    I can't tell you how true this is. The first company I worked for merged with another org, and one of their muckity mucks was given the Director of Innovation position or something equally vague, whilst I was in charge of everything IT. It was absolutely shocking to me how much stuff he did was just bring in consultants he had a past relationship with who would promptly sell him some piece of overpriced enterprise software and charge us huge sums of money to integrate. Didn't matter if there was already a system in the org doing that, didn't matter how our evaluation went, didn't matter if it failed load testing, shove it in. And somehow after every project he was involved with failed, he just kept failing upwards.
- allan_s 2y ago
  It's about probabilities and risks shifting. My understanding after selling software to enterprise is that 1. they are risk averse, they prefer a solution that will improve by 0.1% the [whatever metrics they care about] with 0% chance of failure than one with over 9000% improvement and a 1% chance of failure. 2. To be sure of 1) they want a) a track record of success (the famous, "what are your other enterprise client") b) they have a loooong selling process where you will need to talk to their security team, their legal team, their change management team etc. 3. They have complex rules inherited from dozen of years of internal politics, merge and acquisition, half-done transition and they are not ready to change for you. (because the last time they did, it ended badly) 4. For the same reason they have a complex ecosystem of software that has not been made to intercommunicate with others, so your software will need to do excel export, talk to SFTP, talk to SOAP services, talk to system in COBOL where you must be sre that the field X can not exceed 5 digits in decimal representation. 5. They want to be sure you will still be alive in 5 years This being said , it means the vital part to be a enterprise software company is 1. you need a team that knows how to navigate their process, and not only your sales teams, you need technical guys , product guys that knows how to talk to a security team, the enteprise IT team 2. you need a technical team that will not laugh or flee when you will tell them to create a SOAP connector 3. you need to have more than 2 years of runaway (otherwise you will not having finished half of the sales process ) 4. you need a final software that does what they pay you for (in case of a payroll software: one that is able to generate a correct payslip ) with 0 risk of risks for them (you can have bugs , if you have a good insurance :) ) these things exists independently of the UX for the final user. One can even say it makes it harder, because making things simple is harder for hard things, and sorry but if you tell me the project is going to be 2 month longer because we will tweak the UX with end users , in addition to all the meetings are done, I will remove this step. so it means you can't have an enterprise with good UX without the proverbial soap connector, but the opposite can exists, which means at the end pure math dictate that you will see a lot of enteprise software with poor UX.
brisdak 2y ago
Timesheets in Workday has to be the worst implementation i've ever come across. It's so painful that I just clone every week now instead of doing it properly.
- djbusby 2y ago
  Proof that Workday improves efficiency.
blantonl 2y ago
Enterprise software is a pig dressed up with lipstick from an army of sales and marketing drones. Never underestimate the power of sales quotas, rolex watches, conferences, booth babes, president's club trips, expense accounts, and people yacking on their phones in airports talking about getting to the "decision makers." You only need to review the org charts and financials of any enterprise software organization to see where the priorities are: 80% goes to sales and marketing, 10% to developers, and 10% to legal.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  > You only need to review the org charts and financials of any enterprise software organization to see where the priorities are: 80% goes to sales and marketing, 10% to developers, and 10% to legal. Got any examples? I have never seen an organization where that was actually true, nor anywhere close.
- RunSet 2y ago
  > Enterprise software is a pig dressed up with lipstick from an army of sales and marketing drones. To the point that I now consider "enterprise" a euphemism for "substandard". Takes a little of the shine off Star Trek.
- DanielHB 2y ago
  And an army of consultants to adapt the enterprise solution to your needs
  - blantonl 2y ago
    That's called "the channel" in enterprise software speak
- drumdance 2y ago
  I'm job hunting right now and one of my must-not-haves for any employer is that they're sales driven instead of product driven. I'd rather work for university IT department than at Oracle.
RunSet 2y ago
Contriving and placing obstacles between people and gainful employment distorts unemployment statistics. A nonzero number of people will refuse to engage with these stupid systems as a matter of principle, even to their own detriment. Workday enables marginalizing potential "problem" (excessively integritudinous) employees without ever crafting explicit policies to do so.
pprotas 2y ago
> But you'd set up a user ID to apply to the previous job, so this should be — huh? It wants an entirely new ID. New company, new profile, new form. Oof. Surely it saved your application entries from the other job, right? Nope. Surely this should not be desired behavior? I'd be really scared if I apply to a different company and they already have my resume from my previous job.
- binarymax 2y ago
  Should be easy enough to let the applicant choose what happens. Why must it be one way or another all the time?
aomix 2y ago
I wonder what the Venn Diagram looks like for how Workday and Jira and Confluence exist in a hell zone where they are allowed to suck ass and make everybody miserable and have market dominance.
himinlomax 2y ago
Workday is bad, but it's paradise UI-wise compared to the likes of SAP.
- Breza 2y ago
  My workplace migrated expense reporting from Expensify to SAP Concur and I miss it every month. So glad I don't have to use anything else from SAP.
itsdrewmiller 2y ago
Workday is like 40th percentile bad software - there is worse enterprise software (SAP) and worse recruiting software (anyone ever have to work with iCIMS?).
akhilrex 2y ago
This is the same story with Salesforce. I am building a new age quoting solution (CPQ) at my latest startup and talk to businesses of various stages regularly. Our biggest "competitor" out there right now is Salesforce CPQ. There is not one person that I have met so far who has not said that onboarding, configuring and then successfully using Salesforce CPQ is a painful process. What SF CPQ does in weeks, sometimes months, we (and our contemporaries) are able to accomplish in hours. And yet the huge entry barrier exists for startups like us is because SFDC has got the CRM market completely covered. Just because they are able to do CRM well, they are then able to build a walled garden around it.
- blantonl 2y ago
  they are then able to build a walled garden around it. Really what it boils down to is you are completely outmatched on the sales and marketing side. The decision makers have already worked with the sales exec and that relationship has been cultivated over countless steak dinners, expensive bottles of wine, and boondoggles disguised as "technical education." And given they already have the tentacles in these organizations, all they need to do is turn the knob to zero for their <insert_shitty_complimentary_product> and practically give it to your potential customer for free. Now the CIO looks like a real winner to the CFO/CEO, the relationship moves forward, maintenance contracts get renewed, and the back slapping continues.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  Is everything in Salesforce land like this? I worked with a nonprofit and we tried to implement their nonprofit solution, and it was exactly like that. One of my current clients was trying to onboard one of their industry specific solutions that was only available through a channel/partner engagement. Decided to add SFMC into the mix but it was out of scope for the partner so she sent me the documentation. A 400 page PDF of absolute garbage which was impossible to implement because it was filled with references to missing information, deprecated or removed features, and bizarre directives to do things that weren’t even sensible or possible. Ended up scrapping the entire project after four months and six digits in billables to Salesforce and the partner with nothing to show for it.
throwawayyy9237 2y ago
I have to use both Jira and Workday. Unpopular opinion, perhaps: I find them ugly and slow, but not soul-crushing. Granted, I only use WD to book PTO. If my whole work was around it, I would probably hate it too. My work _is_ around Jira, but my opinion is just a strong "meh". Companies should definitely find better alternatives, but the hyperbole is a meme at this point, e.g. "I'd rather be unemployed than use Jira"
DanielHB 2y ago
There is far more enterprise software than most people realise, everybody complaining about Jira, Salesforce, SAP. It gets much worse once you go to special-purpose/domain-specific enterprise software.
- Breza 2y ago
  It depends. Some niche software is so entrenched that they have no incentive to improve. But other domains are nimble enough that there's still a fight for market share.
emmanuel_1234 2y ago
Workday may be bad, but it has nothing on Taleo.
vanyle 2y ago
Workday good actually! Yes really nice
joshglen 2y ago
For those applying to companies that use workday, please note that you can upload .docx files. They are parsed much more easily (and correctly). It will likely take a while to find what's messed up in your resume after that point, but once you have it in one place, autofill should work correctly everywhere.
cdeutsch 2y ago
I've reached out to a few hiring managers and recruiters and let them know I gave up on applying for their job because their software failed to parse my resume containing 20+ years of experience. I truly hope whoever thought it was a good idea to stop accepting PDFs resumes, loses their job and spends the rest of their life trying to apply for jobs using these awful platforms.

86 points by gulced 2y ago

> Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperation. "It's like constantly being botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate." Workday's success is 100% explained by Arvind Narayanan's hypothesis that enterprise software is like baby clothing.[a] If I may quote him: "There are two types of baby outfits. The first is targeted at people buying gifts. It's irresistible on the rack. It has no fewer than 18 buttons. At least 3 people are needed to get a screaming baby into it. It's worn once, so you can send a photo to the gifter, then discarded. Other baby outfits are meant for parents. They’re marked "Easy On, Easy Off" or some such, and they really mean it. Zippers aren't easy enough so they fasten using MAGNETS. A busy parent (i.e. a parent) can change an outfit in 5 seconds, one handed, before rushing to work. The point is, some products are sold directly to the end user, and are forced to prioritize usability. Other products are sold to an intermediary whose concerns are typically different from the user's needs. Such products don't HAVE to end up as unusable garbage, but usually do." HR managers, rank-and-file employees, and job applicants have never been Workday's customers. Its actual customers are the corporations seeking to quantify, manage, and control those users. Inevitably, it's them, the users, who find themselves "botsmacked by bureaucracy incarnate." Couldn't have said it better! --- [a] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html

Y_Y 2y ago
I genuinely feel troubled by how accurate this is. When the little startup I was at got acquired by a megacorp we had to migrate a lot of tooling. It shocked me how different some of the software is in a philosophical sense. When you only have fifty people it's hard not to think about the plight of your code monkeys, even when you're getting schmoozed by a sales rep. Once you manage to put a couple of elevator rides and a secretary between the decision maker and the work-doer you can go full principal-agent and really take a big old dump into the air con in the programmers' sub-basement.

rco8786 2y ago

The Jira of HR tooling. Technically does everything you need it to, but leaves you sweaty and frustrated upon completion of even the simplest of tasks.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

From personal experience, I can attest that it is horrible. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

nutrie 2y ago

SAP, Salesforce and Workday came straight from the devil himself.

cs702 2y ago
Dammit, you made me spit my coffee out of laughter!
- CoastalCoder 2y ago
  Me too! The obvious answer is Oracle's legal department.
blantonl 2y ago
Websphere also resides down low in the sweatshop of evil.
Breza 2y ago
I've gotten so fed up with Salesforce that I've taken to exporting data and reports using SOQL and displaying them in external dashboards.

jterrys 2y ago

Tools That I Fucking Hate Which I Never Thought I Would Use, Abuse, or Have To Learn: -Jira -Workday -SAP -Excel Corporate hell :'(

steve1977 2y ago
Why Excel? (fully agree with the rest)
- kayo_20211030 2y ago
  Yeah. Excel is the bees. Fine hating on all the rest.
- jterrys 2y ago
  Because I do far more work in excel than I do programming And I hate excel for it
rco8786 2y ago
> Excel This is like the single greatest piece of software to ever exist, and I mean that with 100% sincerity. I am baffled that you would include Excel in this list.

_benj 2y ago

> The answer, to use a term that any client of Workday could surely use, is POSIWID. This is a saying in systems thinking: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID), not what it fails to do. And the reality is that what Workday — and its many despised competitors — does for organizations is far more important than the anguish it causes everyone else. That’s the part that baffles me. There’s less crappy HR software out there, I’ve been in companies that use better software, but still workday seems like the default choice? The only explanation that comes to mind is that the people that buy workday don’t use it. There’s a similar issue with LMS and educational software. I’ve talked with a few teachers and professors and it’s usually common that they hate __ LMS (I’ve talked with some that love another) but teachers, except in rare cases, are not the ones that make software purchases decisions for their schools or districts. So if that’s the case all the workday needs to do to keep selling tons is to make pretty reports and tell executives how much money they can save by using their software instead of some more “hip” solution out there.

ethbr1 2y ago
Cost centers attract bad software, because buyers always prioritize "most checkboxes for lowest price" and ignore UX. Put another way, how many HR departments do you know that have a continual process improvement of their employee productivity? So why would vendors ever optimize UX?
johannes1234321 2y ago
> The only explanation that comes to mind is that the people that buy workday don’t use it. They probably have a good sales team inviting the CIO/HR boss/... to a golf course and convince them to buying. But those people then don't have to use it. For their own expenses etc. they got an assistant filing it and the reports they got printed out or otherwise summarized by somebody else.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

rwmj 2y ago

We have to use Workday and everyone hates it with a passion. What baffles me is how disjoint it is. It's like the user interface was designed by several teams that were competing with each other. There's simply no rhyme or reason behind where things are. If you navigate away from something then good luck finding it again (you might though, find the same information presented in a different way in some other part of the UI). The forms and controls are like something from My First Website that you wrote in 1999. Since everyone in the company (including senior management) have to use it, I don't understand who signed off on it unless they left the company right afterwards.

baal80spam 2y ago

I have flashbacks from my previous job. Workday is PTSD-inducing.

veeti 2y ago

> Workday could conceivably build its own encrypted database of our information, across our different jobs and applications. When you leave Spotify to go work at Netflix, your profile could follow you, allowing you to more easily apply to the job. The multiplying powers of tech could scale to free us of our busy work, as promised. Maybe it's better they don't build such a shared profile, or soon hiring managers can see you've applied to 200 jobs and been rejected from all of them.

CoastalCoder 2y ago
Couldn't they just define a standard resume file format, and let all of the Workday implementations support importing it?
- blantonl 2y ago
  define a standard resume file format This right here is a 8 year project that would cost 1.2 billion dollars. And it would fail miserably before it got out of the requirements analysis phase.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    Is this a comment on Workday's development pace? (I've never directly worked with them, so I can't tell if that's your point.)
    - blantonl 2y ago
      It’s a comment on enterprise software’s development pace
      - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
        And, if it were a standard, then once it was released every other vendor and group would write their own not-quite-compliant implementation :)

megadal 2y ago

It's strange how pervasive poor UI/UX (and poor software in general) is in enterprise software. I have never seen an ERP that looks and feels good to use (though I am sure some exist; I suspect Odoo falls in this category, but only because it's open source), they all just kind of exist as a means to an end, despite most ERPs being at least 50% of the chrome tabs an office worker keeps open all day. I wonder if this phenomenon serves as evidence that many decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes. Even marketing around most ERPs is designed this way: bulleted list of boxes checked off with almost zero real product previews

blantonl 2y ago
decision makers don't really care about their workers and only seek to check boxes Decision makers are simply a cog in the sales and marketing machine. 92.4517% of enterprise software decisions are driven by the relationship between the machine and decision maker without any regard to features, functionality, or fit.
- Volundr 2y ago
  I can't tell you how true this is. The first company I worked for merged with another org, and one of their muckity mucks was given the Director of Innovation position or something equally vague, whilst I was in charge of everything IT. It was absolutely shocking to me how much stuff he did was just bring in consultants he had a past relationship with who would promptly sell him some piece of overpriced enterprise software and charge us huge sums of money to integrate. Didn't matter if there was already a system in the org doing that, didn't matter how our evaluation went, didn't matter if it failed load testing, shove it in. And somehow after every project he was involved with failed, he just kept failing upwards.
allan_s 2y ago
It's about probabilities and risks shifting. My understanding after selling software to enterprise is that 1. they are risk averse, they prefer a solution that will improve by 0.1% the [whatever metrics they care about] with 0% chance of failure than one with over 9000% improvement and a 1% chance of failure. 2. To be sure of 1) they want a) a track record of success (the famous, "what are your other enterprise client") b) they have a loooong selling process where you will need to talk to their security team, their legal team, their change management team etc. 3. They have complex rules inherited from dozen of years of internal politics, merge and acquisition, half-done transition and they are not ready to change for you. (because the last time they did, it ended badly) 4. For the same reason they have a complex ecosystem of software that has not been made to intercommunicate with others, so your software will need to do excel export, talk to SFTP, talk to SOAP services, talk to system in COBOL where you must be sre that the field X can not exceed 5 digits in decimal representation. 5. They want to be sure you will still be alive in 5 years This being said , it means the vital part to be a enterprise software company is 1. you need a team that knows how to navigate their process, and not only your sales teams, you need technical guys , product guys that knows how to talk to a security team, the enteprise IT team 2. you need a technical team that will not laugh or flee when you will tell them to create a SOAP connector 3. you need to have more than 2 years of runaway (otherwise you will not having finished half of the sales process ) 4. you need a final software that does what they pay you for (in case of a payroll software: one that is able to generate a correct payslip ) with 0 risk of risks for them (you can have bugs , if you have a good insurance :) ) these things exists independently of the UX for the final user. One can even say it makes it harder, because making things simple is harder for hard things, and sorry but if you tell me the project is going to be 2 month longer because we will tweak the UX with end users , in addition to all the meetings are done, I will remove this step. so it means you can't have an enterprise with good UX without the proverbial soap connector, but the opposite can exists, which means at the end pure math dictate that you will see a lot of enteprise software with poor UX.

brisdak 2y ago

Timesheets in Workday has to be the worst implementation i've ever come across. It's so painful that I just clone every week now instead of doing it properly.

djbusby 2y ago
Proof that Workday improves efficiency.

blantonl 2y ago

Enterprise software is a pig dressed up with lipstick from an army of sales and marketing drones. Never underestimate the power of sales quotas, rolex watches, conferences, booth babes, president's club trips, expense accounts, and people yacking on their phones in airports talking about getting to the "decision makers." You only need to review the org charts and financials of any enterprise software organization to see where the priorities are: 80% goes to sales and marketing, 10% to developers, and 10% to legal.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> You only need to review the org charts and financials of any enterprise software organization to see where the priorities are: 80% goes to sales and marketing, 10% to developers, and 10% to legal. Got any examples? I have never seen an organization where that was actually true, nor anywhere close.
RunSet 2y ago
> Enterprise software is a pig dressed up with lipstick from an army of sales and marketing drones. To the point that I now consider "enterprise" a euphemism for "substandard". Takes a little of the shine off Star Trek.
DanielHB 2y ago
And an army of consultants to adapt the enterprise solution to your needs
- blantonl 2y ago
  That's called "the channel" in enterprise software speak
drumdance 2y ago
I'm job hunting right now and one of my must-not-haves for any employer is that they're sales driven instead of product driven. I'd rather work for university IT department than at Oracle.

RunSet 2y ago

Contriving and placing obstacles between people and gainful employment distorts unemployment statistics. A nonzero number of people will refuse to engage with these stupid systems as a matter of principle, even to their own detriment. Workday enables marginalizing potential "problem" (excessively integritudinous) employees without ever crafting explicit policies to do so.

pprotas 2y ago

> But you'd set up a user ID to apply to the previous job, so this should be — huh? It wants an entirely new ID. New company, new profile, new form. Oof. Surely it saved your application entries from the other job, right? Nope. Surely this should not be desired behavior? I'd be really scared if I apply to a different company and they already have my resume from my previous job.

binarymax 2y ago
Should be easy enough to let the applicant choose what happens. Why must it be one way or another all the time?

aomix 2y ago

I wonder what the Venn Diagram looks like for how Workday and Jira and Confluence exist in a hell zone where they are allowed to suck ass and make everybody miserable and have market dominance.

himinlomax 2y ago

Workday is bad, but it's paradise UI-wise compared to the likes of SAP.

Breza 2y ago
My workplace migrated expense reporting from Expensify to SAP Concur and I miss it every month. So glad I don't have to use anything else from SAP.

itsdrewmiller 2y ago

Workday is like 40th percentile bad software - there is worse enterprise software (SAP) and worse recruiting software (anyone ever have to work with iCIMS?).

akhilrex 2y ago

This is the same story with Salesforce. I am building a new age quoting solution (CPQ) at my latest startup and talk to businesses of various stages regularly. Our biggest "competitor" out there right now is Salesforce CPQ. There is not one person that I have met so far who has not said that onboarding, configuring and then successfully using Salesforce CPQ is a painful process. What SF CPQ does in weeks, sometimes months, we (and our contemporaries) are able to accomplish in hours. And yet the huge entry barrier exists for startups like us is because SFDC has got the CRM market completely covered. Just because they are able to do CRM well, they are then able to build a walled garden around it.

blantonl 2y ago
they are then able to build a walled garden around it. Really what it boils down to is you are completely outmatched on the sales and marketing side. The decision makers have already worked with the sales exec and that relationship has been cultivated over countless steak dinners, expensive bottles of wine, and boondoggles disguised as "technical education." And given they already have the tentacles in these organizations, all they need to do is turn the knob to zero for their <insert_shitty_complimentary_product> and practically give it to your potential customer for free. Now the CIO looks like a real winner to the CFO/CEO, the relationship moves forward, maintenance contracts get renewed, and the back slapping continues.
TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
Is everything in Salesforce land like this? I worked with a nonprofit and we tried to implement their nonprofit solution, and it was exactly like that. One of my current clients was trying to onboard one of their industry specific solutions that was only available through a channel/partner engagement. Decided to add SFMC into the mix but it was out of scope for the partner so she sent me the documentation. A 400 page PDF of absolute garbage which was impossible to implement because it was filled with references to missing information, deprecated or removed features, and bizarre directives to do things that weren’t even sensible or possible. Ended up scrapping the entire project after four months and six digits in billables to Salesforce and the partner with nothing to show for it.

throwawayyy9237 2y ago

I have to use both Jira and Workday. Unpopular opinion, perhaps: I find them ugly and slow, but not soul-crushing. Granted, I only use WD to book PTO. If my whole work was around it, I would probably hate it too. My work _is_ around Jira, but my opinion is just a strong "meh". Companies should definitely find better alternatives, but the hyperbole is a meme at this point, e.g. "I'd rather be unemployed than use Jira"

DanielHB 2y ago

There is far more enterprise software than most people realise, everybody complaining about Jira, Salesforce, SAP. It gets much worse once you go to special-purpose/domain-specific enterprise software.

Breza 2y ago
It depends. Some niche software is so entrenched that they have no incentive to improve. But other domains are nimble enough that there's still a fight for market share.

emmanuel_1234 2y ago

Workday may be bad, but it has nothing on Taleo.

vanyle 2y ago

Workday good actually! Yes really nice

joshglen 2y ago

For those applying to companies that use workday, please note that you can upload .docx files. They are parsed much more easily (and correctly). It will likely take a while to find what's messed up in your resume after that point, but once you have it in one place, autofill should work correctly everywhere.

cdeutsch 2y ago

I've reached out to a few hiring managers and recruiters and let them know I gave up on applying for their job because their software failed to parse my resume containing 20+ years of experience. I truly hope whoever thought it was a good idea to stop accepting PDFs resumes, loses their job and spends the rest of their life trying to apply for jobs using these awful platforms.