How to Prepare for Your Technical Assessment at Workday

At Workday, we deliver leading-edge applications in the HCM and Finance space that tackle the complex business needs of some of the world’s leading companies across a range of industries.

By combining a unique blend of proprietary and open source technologies, we’re able to develop product features at blistering speed while applying the correct technology to solve each problem.

One of the technologies we use is a pure object-oriented proprietary language called XpressO, which focuses on object-oriented design of any object within the system. This abstraction means that developers are primarily focused on the business logic layer.

Solid object-oriented models are foundational to everything we do. The starting point for any new feature or enhancement is the class model, whether that be modifying an existing one or building from scratch.

Due to their high complexity and pervasive nature, these object models are carefully considered and debated in a highly collaborative environment, and your ability as a developer to easily express or understand an object model is fundamental to your success in the role.

What’s Involved in the Tech Test?

During the tech test, you will be given a set of requirements relating to a business problem similar to one you might encounter as a developer here at Workday. For example, you will be asked to outline a high level solution by producing a class model diagram.

While the diagram expected is relatively simple, using a lightweight version of UML, we expect you to clearly communicate how your model satisfies the requirements given. As the test moves on, you may be given subsequent requirements, and asked to address these by modifying and refactoring the existing model.

A Tech Test Example

Below is an example of a set of requirements that are modeled.

You may note from the model that there is no code to access the data. This is because we are simply looking for a way to traverse the model to get to the data and the correct cardinalities will take care of iteration.

Expanding the model to support more requirements builds on the complexity of the model. More OOP concepts are added and the structure changes to support the required enhancements.

The model can then be traversed to get more information based on further requirements.

The tech test might then continue with some follow up questions to explore how the solution could be improved. For example:

“Can you optimize the model further to remove data redundancy?”

Why Do We Have a Tech Test?

We are looking for candidates who can talk through problems at a business logic layer and collaborate with team members to find solutions. We’d like to understand how you can take a problem from our customers and design a new class model, or enhance an existing one, to solve it.

The test will also help us understand how you communicate and debate in a group setting about the merits, drawbacks and robustness of your chosen design. Don’t worry: the test is not about what coding language you use, whether that be XpressO, Java, Python or Scala, but rather the shared technical language of our teams which is the Model Diagrams.

After a successful tech test, you should be able to demonstrate to us your ability to express yourself using this shared language of our application development teams. Make sure you practice. Good luck!

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