> Every HR professional and hiring manager I spoke with — whose lives are supposedly made easier by Workday — described Workday with a sense of cosmic exasperat

> 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