I applied online in late October and received an email a day later to schedule a phone interview. After the phone interview, I took a skills assessment through ProctorU a week later. Then I had an on-site interview two weeks later. All told, the process took four weeks, from application to offer.

The phone interview is about an hour-long chat with a current developer. Standard interview questions are asked; be prepared to talk about a few projects and your roles in them. After this, you'll talk about the culture at Epic, the benefits of working there (the guy I talked with emphasized the lack of cubicles and perks like the subsidized cafeteria), the typical software stack, and Madison, WI.

The skills assessment is done on ProctorU. I had never taken a test using the service, but apparently it's common in certain universities for final exams and the like for online courses. When you're taking the test, you'll have another person monitoring you through a webcam, looking for suspicious movement. Before the test starts, they will gain access to your computer and check your process list to close down any unnecessary programs (it irked me that they shut down Dropbox without even asking). They'll also ensure that your screen does not have any sticky notes on it, that your workspace is cleared, and so forth. They see your screen at all times. You're allowed a calculator and some scratch paper.

The assessment consists of four parts; the first three are written about elsewhere (Glassdoor has an annoying post limit which necessitated truncating this part).

Final part is a four-question programming test. This is pretty challenging; my biggest problem is that I often look at reference websites when writing code that uses standard libraries, and I had no such luxury for this test. As a result, much of what I wrote was pseudocode, as detailed as I could make it, and using real code when I could remember it. I also commented well and provided thoughts about time complexity and efficiency when appropriate. You can write in C, C++, Java, Python, etc. Javascript and other functional languages are unlisted, if I recall correctly.

You should have an excellent grasp on string manipulation and data structures (both standard and custom). I'd recommend working out some problems on Project Euler, as one question would resemble those sorts of math-based programming challenges. I won't state the specific problems, since it is worth more to a programmer to prepare generally and to be able to solve these problems on the spot.

They recommend allowing two to three hours to take the test, and this was pretty accurate for me. The first three sections fly by; I took three hours on the last section, however.

It took five days for Epic to get back to me after the assessment. Along with selecting a date for the on-site interview, I also had to take a Rembrandt personality test, which is short and easy.

The on-site interview was actually the best part of the process. They covered my airfare and hotel room. You can choose to have dinner with some current employees and a few other candidates (Madison has excellent restaurants by the way, so I strongly recommend you do this!).

I arrived at the Epic campus at 8 AM the next morning. There is a software demo with a current developer, who will talk about their project, the impact Epic has in healthcare, and will answer any questions. This is in a group of about eight candidates. This group splits off so that four candidates have a conversation with a project lead about working at Epic.

After this, I met another developer and had an interview where I presented a project I had worked on and answered questions about implementation, challenges, etc.

Following this was a case-study interview with yet another developer. They present a general problem to solve, and you have to create the basic system to solve it. When you are doing this, they are constantly asking questions about how your system will handle extreme/odd cases. This can get pretty stressful, I suppose, but any programmer should be able to prototype a system fairly quickly.

The last person I met was my recruiter from HR, who looked over my application, transcripts, and references, and asked me general questions like my strengths/weaknesses and what I was expecting in terms of salary, career growth, and so on. Be sure to know how much you are worth and ask accordingly!

After this, I had lunch, toured the campus, and went home.

I received an offer 1.5 weeks later. It is extremely competitive with other tech companies (the pay is basically equivalent to Google/Microsoft when considering the low cost of living in Madison) and with comprehensive benefits.