What People Say

Away from the court filings, this case has been argued out for two years in the comment sections of Reddit and in viral threads on X - mostly by three groups who rarely agree: job seekers who feel it in their own rejection emails, the recruiters and Workday administrators who configure the software for a living, and career-advice creators who've turned individual rulings into widely-shared explainers.

A note on what this page is and isn't: everything below is public opinion, personal anecdote, or informal commentary - not a verified fact. Ordinary commenters on Reddit are never named and are paraphrased rather than quoted at length, to respect the people who wrote them and because we don't want to imply casual commentary carries the same weight as a court record. The X posts cited are different in kind: they're from named public career-advice creators posting under their own brand, to a wide audience, on purpose - so they're attributed and link to the original post, the same way a media citation would. Every source is linked in full at the bottom so you can check it yourself.

What we checked and didn't find: we also looked for genuine public discussion on Facebook and Discord. We didn't find any worth citing - the Facebook activity we could find was inside private groups (not something we'll quote or link to), and Discord conversation about this case, if it exists, isn't in public, indexed channels we could locate. We're noting that plainly rather than padding this page out with platforms that didn't actually turn up anything.

"It's not Workday, it's the customer" - the most repeated argument

In threads populated by people who actually administer Workday for a living (particularly r/workday), the dominant reaction is skepticism that "AI" is even the right word. Several describe Workday as a modular platform with no default rejection logic of its own - individual employers, they say, configure their own filters (location, years of experience, and similar criteria), and Workday merely hosts the tool. A few go further, arguing Workday has "zero incentive to discriminate" since it isn't the one making hiring decisions, and that online commentary vastly overstates how "smart" applicant-tracking software actually is.

That view shows up in job-seeker subreddits too, just as a minority position - one recurring rebuttal there compares it to blaming a phone carrier because a breakup happened over text.

"It's not an accident" - the counter-argument

Plenty of commenters reject the "just a tool" framing outright. The most common counter-argument: if a platform allows discriminatory filtering to happen at all, the company that built and sold that capability shares responsibility, regardless of who flips the switch. One frequently-echoed analogy: a marketplace isn't allowed to let sellers list illegal goods just because the seller chose to list them. Several commenters said flatly that they don't believe any of this is "accidental," suspecting the systems are tuned to filter by proxy characteristics - things like graduation year, zip code, or name - that correlate with age, race, or gender without ever asking about them directly.

Personal experiences from job seekers

Across every job-seeker-oriented thread, a similar story repeats with small variations: applications rejected within minutes (sometimes literally overnight or on a holiday, when no reviewer could plausibly have been working), qualified candidates auto-rejected for roles they'd already been scheduled to interview for through a human recruiter, and people in their 40s and 50s describing hundreds of applications with next to no callbacks despite strong resumes. One commenter described being tipped off by a contact inside a hiring company that their application had been excluded from the candidate list the hiring manager actually saw. Several people connected this to gender as well as age, describing a suspiciously narrow "hireable" window bounded on one side by being seen as too junior and on the other by being seen as being of "reproductive age" or older.

Multiple threads doubled as informal recruiting drives for the actual lawsuit - commenters posting that they'd just opted in, sharing tips on how to search old emails for evidence of past Workday applications, and reassuring each other that retaliation against people who join is legally barred.

Skepticism about whether any of this will actually change anything

A consistent undercurrent, especially in threads about court rulings, is doubt that the lawsuit will meaningfully change outcomes even if plaintiffs win - citing how slowly the case has moved, expectations that Workday will appeal whatever it can, and general cynicism that large companies settle or lobby their way around accountability rather than change their products. One commenter pushed back on the framing entirely, arguing no company is obligated to hire anyone and that the burden of proof should sit with the plaintiffs.

One outside expert, quoted

Discussion of a Wall Street Journal profile of Derek Mobley circulated a quote from Ifeoma Ajunwa, a University of Emory law professor and author of a book on algorithmic hiring, arguing that companies acting as "hiring intermediaries" have largely escaped the kind of legal scrutiny applied to employers directly - and that this case could be the one that changes that. (That's the professor's assessment as reported by the WSJ, not a Reddit commenter's opinion - it's just how most Reddit readers encountered it.)

On X: viral explainer threads reach a much bigger audience than Reddit

Career-advice creator Amanda Goodall (@thejobchick) turned two separate rulings in this case into threads that reached a far larger audience than any Reddit post about it - one was reported to have drawn nearly 5 million views. Her posts translate court developments into blunt, plain-language stakes for job seekers: one opens "UPDATE: The AI didn't just ghost your resume. It discriminated," framing the judge's order that Workday hand over its list of employers using HiredScore as turning that list "into evidence." A second, on the age-discrimination ruling, argues "'The algorithm did it' is NOT a defense" and warns that "every company using automated hiring just stepped into legal" exposure.

Separately, product-strategy writer Aakash Gupta summarized the case for a tech-industry audience, opening with Derek Mobley's own rejection numbers - "applied to over 100 jobs. He was rejected from every single one. Several rejections came at 1am, within minutes of submitting" - before noting he "became the lead plaintiff in the largest AI lawsuit ever certified."

The throughline from X mirrors Reddit's job-seeker side almost exactly - alarm at automated, near-instant rejection and a sense that a court finally treated "the algorithm did it" as an accountability gap rather than an excuse - just amplified to a much wider, more casual audience than a subreddit reaches.

For what's actually been established in court, rather than argued about online, see the case timeline. For citations from professional news coverage instead of informal commentary, see In the Media.