My theory is that companies choose workday because it saves them money. If I have an expense below a certain threshold, I just eat it rather than dealing with workday's insanely complex expense report flow.
I was railing against workday for a different reason last week. I had a qualifying event and needed to add a dependent to my health insurance. The first screen in the flow was to change my coverage, but it only offered "self" plans (not the self + dependent I was trying to change to). I finally learned (after 2 screenshot laden emails with HR) that I had to "submit my choice and continue" for the wrong plan before I'd be allowed to choose the correct self + dependent plan on some future screen that I had no idea even existed. The "submit my choice and continue" felt rather final.
> If your expenses and reimbursements are difficult to file, that's OK, because the people above you don't actually care if you get reimbursed. If it takes applicants 128% longer to apply, the people who implemented Workday don't really care. Throttling applicants is perhaps not intentional, but it's good for the company. [1]
That was also the thesis from an article that made it to HN’s front page a week ago [2].
My favorite part of Workday applications is the fixed list for “field of study”, which doesn’t include my field of study or an “other” option. Or maybe its the “autofill from resume” which always, always fails in different unexpected ways. Or maybe its requiring me to manually enter my name and the current date >3 times.
> the fixed list for “field of study”, which doesn’t include my field of study or an “other” option
If it's anything like the "employment sector" options that banks ask you to pick from, then they're not trying to collect accurate info, but rather asking you to bucket yourself into a categorization system used by some very popular credit/risk-scoring heuristics.
My guess for why an HR platform is asking such a thing: it probably populates a field that can be fetched through an API, by corporate spending platforms (Float et al) that integrate with Workday, to determine (or at least "recommend") the employees who should be issued spend cards.
Agreed, I recall a short time some arm of my company used workday learning for training courses. To do a course, you had to add it to a shopping cart for some reason, then "check out", which opens a popup. If you somehow managed to complete the course, the popup would just close with no indication that the course was actually done.
Anyone looking for work can probably empathize. All the other websites mentioned are distant runners up to that monstrosity.