Workday to acquire Pipedream
newsroom.workday.com
newsroom.workday.com
Pipedream indeed!
It blows my mind that every company has decided to call itself an “AI platform” but it blows my mind even more that the stock market apparently believes them when they say it. Workday was an HR platform five years ago. It still an HR platform today.
They are facinated by llms that they are pouring down money to AI related companies. Can you blame them? Can’t deny, I am also fascinated by llms.
I don’t think they’re fascinated by LLMs in the way the average Hacker News user is. They are fascinated by the pipedream (intended) of LLMs enabling them to lay off masses of workers and having AI do the work instead. It fascinates them the same way offshoring has fascinated them for years.
I am not fascinated by that part, I am honestly scared for my future.
Also, anyone who loves coming across Workday and friends (enemies) when applying for jobs?
It's unfortunately commonplace for people using words inconsistently with established usage, or coming up with novel usages that create ambiguity with respect to existing terms, to use "language evolves" as a blanket excuse.
But saying "language evolves" merely describes the process by which the current state of the language emerged, and doesn't actually substantiate any specific claim about what that current state actually is.
The point here is that this novel usage of the term "agent" is in conflict with what actually is the current standard meaning of the term, and actually does inhibit communication with people who aren't immersed in tech jargon.
I've encountered this myself when discussing AI tooling with the team managing a customer service call center, where "agent" is a pervasive term that already refers to human staff.
Their multiple is 105 lol
The current price is indeed an indication of what the market believes will happen to the company's performance. It doesn't matter if their estimates will eventually be proven right or wrong. Looking at forward P/E will serve precisely to express what the market's "crystal ball" is saying! That's what we want to know. What do people think this company is worth?
Conversely, the current price and their past earnings are not related, so dividing one by the other is mostly just noise.
> Manage HR, finance, and all your AI agents. All in one place.
> Elevate the potential of your people and boost productivity across your organization with human-AI collaboration.
> Turn AI into ROI faster and deliver transformational outcomes driven by trust, agility, and data readiness you can rely on.
> 11,000+ organizations worldwide trust Workday.
Huh?
Sure, whatever, I'm not even surprised about them trying to cram AI buzzwords into every sentence, I'm used to that by now. But what's the deal with enterprise products having marketing which only makes sense to people who already use the product? Not a single sentence on their homepage explains what their product does.
Ok, let's assume I've heard about Workday and know it's a tool for HR. I want to evaluate it, so, naturally, I click the "HR solutions" link on their homepage, and get to yet another page full of buzzwords that does nothing to help me understand the service they offer.
Plus if you describe yourself in very high level terms, then your addressable market is bigger and you can get more money from investors.
In the same vein, I always thought it was a mistake that Workday branded the recruiting portal so strongly; everyone is furious that they can’t share an account across applications but it really makes sense. They’re supplying the Workday customer with their recruiting data / PII using Workday, not furnishing that data to Workday directly, so sharing across customers would require a whole legal and data tenancy refactoring.
(disclosure: I worked at Workday for a long time ages ago and people were certainly not living with their heads in the sand. I don’t think I particularly agree with the direction the company is going but it is always interesting to reflect on some of these threads and the challenges with running that kind of business)
I think I now understand.
After so many years with Workday I still cannot sync my calendar to outlook365, so I need to manually put the entries. A problem solved a million years ago in successfactors.
We all should be aware that equifax — via their "strategic partner" with workday — has your ENTIRE work history with *each and every* payroll check AMOUNT ever sent to you by any W2 employer, the employer info, your address etc. It sells this info to god knows who. Its a shocking amount of info. Previous discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29834753
I recall a year or so ago, I had frozen this info from being dissemenated to employers or sold to companies from https://employees.theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/ link but it seems to ask me to re-register again with your SSN and DOB. WTF. That registration would still not stop them from collecting this info.
There is no way I can even partially delete any part of this data, like I dunno the dates on which I recieved each of my paychecks. Why the fuck is that in the report?
It took many back and forths with my employer’s HR department and executives to get them to tell ADP to stop sending this info to Equifax (work number)
It is? Last I used it, it was a serverless event-driven pipeline platform
runs a crossposting bot here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
spammed package maintainers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31588316
Me when I start crushing on the lady who works on the second floor of my office
This is interesting acquisition, a integration platform to boost their AI offering.
Especially if you use pipedream for integrations in your agent or product.
(I’m one of the founders)