Pros
Workday seems like a great employer for interns and new college grads. They spend a lot of time, effort, and money on their intern and new college grad programs, and provide a lot of opportunity for training, mentoring, networking, and socializing. As an intern or new college grad, I'd jump at the chance to work there. The recruitment and onboarding/orientation process was excellent.
Cons
If you're mid to late career you may struggle because the employee base is quite young and there really aren't too many advancement opportunities. My experience was that they like to promote entry-level employees through the ranks, and do so at a quick pace. I had a colleague who was a new grad and hired into the lowest-level associate role in our group, and he was a manager in 2 years. He was getting promoted every six months and passed up people who had been with the company for years. All that to say, if you're going to advance/have a future in the company, you'll know quickly. If you haven't had significant raises and promotions within 2 years they aren't going to happen - you may not make manager, but you should have a couple significant salary increases and promotions. In talking to a couple of people I found that at one point managers had all asked us if we had considered going into management. (Note that we were all in different departments.) We figure this is a ruse to make some employees feel like they have a future at the company when there is none. New managers were given new employees, new grads, and less senior staff to manage, while senior managers had more senior direct reports. It seemed like senior managers cherry-picked who they wanted to manage, and gave everyone else to the new managers. It's unfortunate because new and early career employees could really benefit from having managers with more experience. My manager had been promoted from IC to manager, and had no management experience. She was afraid to ask for help because she wanted to prove herself as a manager, much to the detriment of her reports. And she was a complete micro-manager, which might have been due to her newness in the role. My particular department was really into top-down management. In my previous job I was expected to take initiative and make decisions, but I was very politely reprimanded for doing the same at Workday. It was like do what you're told and stay in your lane. One of the main reasons I wanted to work at Workday was because of the purported company culture. During the recruitment, interview, and onboarding process, they were all about Workday's culture. But once I started that culture was talked about a lot but never materialize. Some of the behavior and treatment of others I saw by some managers went against everything Workday supposedly stands for. And I felt like some managers really looked down on and thought they were superior to regular staff. Too much to go into here. But it wasn't good. I felt extremely lonely and isolated on a campus of 1000s of employees. It was really depressing. I found out that the Workday I wanted to join was the Workday of 5-10 years earlier. This is all just my experience. Some people that I went through orientation with are still with the company and love it, while others like me have moved on. I think people either absolutely love Workday or they don't. And a lot depends on your department and management chain. I recommend trying to get a contract job there first to see if you like your job and the company. If they like you they'll frequently convert contractors to permanent employees. And if you don't like the company or if they don't like you, you can move on without it hurting your work history. If I had gotten a contract position first, I would have never gone or tried to go permanent there. Salaries tend to be lower than other companies in the Bay Area.
