Charlie Spitzer, a top collaborator in the Workday Community and veteran developer at GoDaddy, has spent over 50 years working alongside the inventors of the internet, relational databases, and spreadsheets. Today, this quiet pioneer helps power GoDaddy’s global payroll operations while giving back to the Workday Community.
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Charlie’s career began at the very beginning, literally. As an intern for the Air Force at the Pentagon in the early 1970s, he worked on software tied to the Arpanet, the precursor to the modern internet. He collaborated with the inventive minds behind TCP/IP, email, and relational databases. His resume reads like a who’s who of computing history, with stints on early operating systems like Multics (a precursor to Unix) and companies pioneering fault-tolerant computing.
But despite this storied past, Charlie doesn’t dwell in nostalgia. Instead, he brings decades of wisdom and curiosity to every challenge he tackles today.
When Charlie joined GoDaddy, he had never worked in HR, payroll, or ERP systems. “They hired me because I had development experience,” he recalls. “I was the first developer in payroll.” Initially, he built integrations for their previous ERP system. But in 2016, GoDaddy adopted Workday, and Charlie’s team grew, slightly.
Today, GoDaddy has just four people managing Workday integrations, supporting 650 active integrations tied to over 150 vendors. That tiny team touches nearly every Workday product except Student and Government. “Any data movement—we do,” Charlie says, describing a portfolio that includes everything from bank payments in France to open enrollment in Colombia and India.
Charlie’s work touches nearly every function of GoDaddy’s business. He helps prioritize and manage global projects while building the integrations that support them. “Half my time is spent gathering requirements and project managing,” he explains. “The other half is building studios, orchestrations, Extend apps, boomerangs, you name it.”
With competing projects, constant learning curves, and the complexity of supporting global operations, Charlie thrives on variety and problem-solving. “We’re always learning. Last week I had to figure out dunning letters. The week before it was open enrollment in Colombia.”
“You can’t teach curiosity directly, but you can model it. You can encourage people to ask questions, to explore solutions.”
Despite the technical complexity and global reach, Charlie is most animated when he talks about mentoring others. “I’m trying to teach people to be curious,” he says. “You can’t teach curiosity directly, but you can model it. You can encourage people to ask questions, to explore solutions.”
Charlie’s involvement in technical communities predates the internet. He was active in Usenet long before online forums became common. “I’ve always been part of communities—whether for tech or hobbies like stained glass,” he says. So when GoDaddy moved to Workday, joining the Workday Community was a natural next step.
“I started using Workday Community because it helped me go faster,” he says. “Someone had already done what I needed—or something close. I could download a solution, tweak it, and move on.”
“GoDaddy encourages open-source participation, and contributing to Community is our way of giving back.”
It wasn’t long before Charlie became one of the Community’s top contributors. His motivation? “GoDaddy encourages open-source participation,” he explains. “And contributing to Community is our way of giving back.”
Charlie estimates he’s shared more than 30 solutions in Community—everything from document extraction systems to bank file integrations. One particularly complex project involved extracting thousands of employee documents from Workday and delivering them to ServiceNow. A Community-contributed solution saved him a month of work. “It didn’t work perfectly, but it gave us a framework,” Charlie recalls. He fixed it, improved it, and re-uploaded it to Community. Now dozens of other companies are using it.
“It’s like open-source for Workday,” he says.
For Charlie, Community is less about recognition and more about resourcefulness. He subscribes to every Community forum, scanning daily digests with hundreds of new posts. “I don’t need to memorize everything—I just need to remember I saw it,” he says. “Community is my encyclopedia.”
The AI search tools recently added to Community have made this process even faster, though Charlie is quick to note the technology is still evolving. “Sometimes it gives me gems. Sometimes it goes completely off the rails,” he laughs.
“I don’t need to memorize everything. I just need to remember I saw it. Community is my encyclopedia.”
One theme that comes up repeatedly in Charlie’s story is the power of self-motivated learning. While he appreciates structured Workday training, he believes true mastery comes from reading, doing, and breaking things. He encourages junior developers to start with a Community solution, understand how it works, and modify it to suit their needs.
“Training teaches you steps,” he says. “But it doesn’t teach you the why or the what if.”
He sees this gap clearly in newer developers. “They get stuck and wait,” he says. “I try to nudge them—to ask questions, do research, dig around.” That mentorship mindset helps build resilience and long-term success, both for GoDaddy and for the Workday ecosystem as a whole.
Charlie’s deep knowledge and generous contributions have made him a go-to collaborator, both inside GoDaddy and across the Workday Community. He’s often brought in early on strategic initiatives to help evaluate feasibility and vendor integration paths.
At some point, he may hang up his developer’s hat in favor of a sea cap to spend more time sailing or crafting stained glass. But until then, Charlie Spitzer remains one of Workday’s most invaluable community champions—a quiet builder who still prefers reading source code to writing status updates, who sees the big picture while fixing the smallest bugs, and who proves that curiosity is the most powerful developer tool.
The Workday Community gives you a space to learn, share ideas, ask questions, and provide feedback—all to help your business move forever forward. Read more stories.
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