Everyone Hates Workday
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
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.
Got any examples? I have never seen an organization where that was actually true, nor anywhere close.
To the point that I now consider "enterprise" a euphemism for "substandard".
Takes a little of the shine off Star Trek.
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
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.
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.
After spending years tweaking poor UXes and months building good ones, I really think good UX starts with a strong foundation.
If a stack starts out with integrity and grows to the appeal of enterprise clients, adding SOAP isn't suddenly going to transform it from a modern SPA to being a crappy session-state adled 2008 MVC experience.
If anything, with a good REST API, you can probably generate SOAP bindings rather easily.
Odoo is a great example of this. It supports enterprises globally yet the software is still rather robust by comparison to the market.
I'm saying that to sell to enteprise with a good UX you need to check a lot of checkboxes, and even if they are independent , the probability to have: * can sell to enterprise
is less than
* can sell to enterprise + have a good UX.
And I'm saying that it's most likely to impede having a good UX because a company's resource is limited.
To start with strong UX fundation means that you've decided either to recrute one less dev, and instead hire a UX designer, or you've recruited a developer with a good UX sense (and it does not cost less, most likely more, than a developer without a good UX sense).
Same, when developing a new feature, taking the UX in account takes equally or more time/money than without.
So at the end a lot of company selling to enterprise ends up with a product without a good UX.
And indeed Odoo is a good example that it's not impossible, which I'm not saying, just less probable.
>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.
https://twitter.com/random_walker/status/1182635589604171776
It's a classic principal-agent problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
It’s an absolute pleasure to use, especially if you like keyboard shortcuts. And it’s fast on even a modest server as long as your database isn’t gasping for resources. Beautifully and simply designed from a UX/UI perspective, IMHO. Especially compared to the monstrosities that most other ERP vendors are putting out. Looking at you, Oracle.
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.
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.
(I've never directly worked with them, so I can't tell if that's your point.)
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.
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.
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!
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[a] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1182635589604171776.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
-Jira
-Workday
-SAP
-Excel
Corporate hell :'(
And I hate excel for it
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.