Pros: Make a real difference in the world. Improve patients' lives and healthcare. Work with intelligent, driven people. The company philosophy is visible in everyday actions and the culture.

Cons: You're expected to work hard and make a difference. If you don't care about health care, this is hard. If you do care about health care, it is very rewarding.

Pros: Epic's culture encourages ownership, and the huge customer base gives developers many opportunities to have a big impact on healthcare. Because the company is privately held and led by developers, decisions are made for the long-term instead of for a quarterly stock market valuation. Executive leadership has the will to make hard decisions and stick with them. Developers have a lot of independence on design and implementation of projects. I've never been given a spec to go code; I've always just been given a problem and asked to solve it or a high-level workflow idea to investigate. Almost all developers do full stack, and you're involved with the full life cycle of projects. You'll talk to customers, write the designs, create the UI mockups (with UXD help), implement the design, and help users during go-live or at post-live visits. You'll see your code in action while patients are receiving care. I've never been discouraged from pursuing a good idea I came up with myself. I might have other work I need to do (e.g., customer commitments, bug fixes, etc.), but if I'm willing to put in the time to get the development done, we'll find a way to get it reviewed and released. These "extra time" projects are some of the things I'm most proud of. Product teams have gotten fairly large as Epic's grown, but individual scrum groups or functional area teams have stayed small so that you know the people you work with pretty well.

Cons: With quarterly releases, the time from QA complete to in production for enhancements is much faster than it used to be, but I still wish the feedback loop was shorter. Healthcare providers are naturally risk-averse (for good reason), but I'd love to get to a place where we could get new features to production environments faster.

Pros: The coworkers are fantastic. I can count on people I work with to be smart and good at their jobs, and to help me when I need it. I feel like what I work on makes a real difference in people's lives, helping doctors and nurses take better care of patients. Overall, the company is ethical in its dealings with customers and generous with charities. The compensation is generous. Upper management communicates at length with employees in monthly staff meetings, so you know more about what's going on than you would at many companies. It is privately owned, so you can be confident things won't change abruptly in unpredictable ways due to acquisition, merger, or generally stockholder pressure. Epic is a process-based company, and the processes have logic behind them.

Cons: The form opinions about people quickly, and it can be hard to change them. The flat hierarchy is good for many things, but "advancement" in terms of higher titles and more official authority are frequently unavailable. If you get a less experienced manager (which can easily happen), you need to help him or her manage you, or you can end up with too much work, and I see plenty of younger employees who struggle with this. Internal development management tools are awkward, and improvement of them isn't a high enough priority.