workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university.
2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?
3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
I have some context here, as my dad used to work at a state college running "the systems". There was era of thin clients and a centralized VAX machine or similar that did all the work. I remember weekends where my dad had to work because they were "running the numbers" which involved calculating grades and producing end of semester reports and such. Somehow this took more than a day of processing for a few thousans students and ran on a big tape machine. Sometimes it would crash or something so someone had to be there to keep things moving.
I don't remember all the details, but this is what they used up til the mid-90s. By then, I could probably run something on my 486 home computer that would complete in half an hour. But there were decades of process and customization embedded in these systems.
When modernization happened, it was swift. My dad was lucky with the timing as he was retiring during the transition so even made bonus money coming back as a consultant. But you can imagine that even if the new software was pricey and not as customizable, the speed improvements and reduction in staff made sense.
Once the old staff was cleared out, there was no department of staff being paid to build computer services, only the lesser staff needed to maintain and use it. The issue was that hardware/Internet usage expanded too fast, the importance and reliance on tech grew and it became a selling point for unis to have the newest systems in place.
It makes sense now for the pendulum to swing in the other direction, as customization and cost are wildly out of balance with AI and the latent tech workforce available at every college.
I would say the blocker now is the same as what allowed creaky old systems to persist into the 90s - administration doesn't give a shit about any of this and it is only viewed as a cost center. Until differentiating through customization provides an obvious and immediate fiscal benefit to the admins themselves, most unis won't look at changing off their shitty landlord systems until they are basically forced to by the market.
Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.
Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount.
HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].
How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again.
It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of working with.
- The UI is slow as hell.
- The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them.
- Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it.
Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.
I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship.
Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry.
The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
As a consultant, I do actually quite enjoy proper shitshow engagements - not least because, from a very selfish point of view, it's often possible to make a really obvious positive impact, which is really satisfying.
For a situation as bad as the one described here, though, the scope for an individual engineer - no matter how experienced - to turn things around is going to be limited. The core problem is almost certainly organisational and cultural rather than technical, so it needs to be addressed at the strategic management level.
I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster.
Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.
It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
So while this may sound like it'll be in the case studies of ERP/CRM etc failed projects, which has some very memorable writeups, the judgement of failure/success is still out (or shd we say jury is out)
It’s horrifying to peak into industries you’re unfamiliar with and see what’s going on. It’s like lifting up the rotting log on your property. You just want to quickly put it back down.
WUSTL has more administrators than students:
> Academic staff 4,551 (2024)
> Administrative staff 17,979 (2024)
> Students 16,399 (fall 2024)
University of Munich, a prestigious university in German, has only 8,200 administrators for 54,000 students. So less than half the administrators for more than triple the number of students.
The University of Munich has a budget of 800 million Euro. Excluding the medical school, WUSTL has a budget over $4 billion.
The medical school accounts for half of all staff but less than 10% of the students - your Munich numbers don't seem to include the affiliated hospital.
One of our local, private, and financially troubled universities has their department hierarchy on line. I was amazed, while recently looking to get in contact with a person about auditing a class, how many "head of XXXX" positions existed in the university directory. It seems way more complicated that it needs to be, and I can see how they would be in financial dire straits.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 47.9 ms ] threadproof we should be getting paid for assessments
1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university.
2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?
3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
the kickbacks are too good.
I don't remember all the details, but this is what they used up til the mid-90s. By then, I could probably run something on my 486 home computer that would complete in half an hour. But there were decades of process and customization embedded in these systems.
When modernization happened, it was swift. My dad was lucky with the timing as he was retiring during the transition so even made bonus money coming back as a consultant. But you can imagine that even if the new software was pricey and not as customizable, the speed improvements and reduction in staff made sense.
Once the old staff was cleared out, there was no department of staff being paid to build computer services, only the lesser staff needed to maintain and use it. The issue was that hardware/Internet usage expanded too fast, the importance and reliance on tech grew and it became a selling point for unis to have the newest systems in place.
It makes sense now for the pendulum to swing in the other direction, as customization and cost are wildly out of balance with AI and the latent tech workforce available at every college.
I would say the blocker now is the same as what allowed creaky old systems to persist into the 90s - administration doesn't give a shit about any of this and it is only viewed as a cost center. Until differentiating through customization provides an obvious and immediate fiscal benefit to the admins themselves, most unis won't look at changing off their shitty landlord systems until they are basically forced to by the market.
HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].
[0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-lou...
[1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/
[2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/
It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
- The UI is slow as hell.
- The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them.
- Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it.
Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.
Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry.
The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
For a situation as bad as the one described here, though, the scope for an individual engineer - no matter how experienced - to turn things around is going to be limited. The core problem is almost certainly organisational and cultural rather than technical, so it needs to be addressed at the strategic management level.
Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.
It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
So while this may sound like it'll be in the case studies of ERP/CRM etc failed projects, which has some very memorable writeups, the judgement of failure/success is still out (or shd we say jury is out)
WUSTL has more administrators than students:
> Academic staff 4,551 (2024)
> Administrative staff 17,979 (2024)
> Students 16,399 (fall 2024)
University of Munich, a prestigious university in German, has only 8,200 administrators for 54,000 students. So less than half the administrators for more than triple the number of students.
The University of Munich has a budget of 800 million Euro. Excluding the medical school, WUSTL has a budget over $4 billion.