Pros: Good community. Pleasant working environment. Work that matters... usually.

Cons: Poor role-and-product-based training. Unclear expectations and standards. Poor work-life balance.

Pros: - Excellent pay for new college grads (at least for the software developer position), a great option if you have debt you want to pay off quickly. - Coworkers are very intelligent and generally helpful. - On-campus food outlets are very affordable and high-quality. - Excellent health insurance.

Cons: As a "software developer", you will also be responsible for high-level project investigation, design, and planning. You will be given a one-sentence summary of a feature and be responsible for everything from that point up to a finished, released product. They hire a small number of designers and end-users for devs to consult/collaborate with, but UX/project scope/etc is always still your responsibility in the end. The company has a strong culture of overwork. The CEO advocates for "work-life mixture" instead of work-life balance. They would rather pay an undersized staff generously to work them in perpetual overtime than hire enough people to do the work at a healthy pace. Some team leads will shield you from this to an extent, but if you get one that doesn't, the company will not step in to save you. Little vacation time. Very few WFH days (~5 days in a year). The tech stack is arcane, and your experience will be largely inapplicable to the rest of the industry. Micromanagement of inconsequential deadlines is common. All employees have to log their work in 15-minute increments.

Pros: Epic offers developers a high salary for the area. Your coworkers at Epic are smart and are genuinely easy to work with. The campus is pleasant, with individual/shared offices instead of an open office.

Cons: As a developer, Epic wouldn't be a first-tier place to work. Traditional software companies offer more interesting problems and come with the additional perk of valuing their employees. Here are some examples of benefits where Epic lags behind: * Only 2 weeks paid maternity leave * 10 paid days off for the first 2 years, moving to 15 paid days off afterward (most companies offer 4 weeks) * Poor vesting schedule One of the main problems currently at Epic is its disappointing COVID-19 response. Management insists on bringing employees back while cases in Wisconsin are still high. Many employees do not feel comfortable returning to campus. It's difficult to understand why an employer would choose to make their employees return to campus and jeopardize employees' peace of mind and potentially their physical health, when remote work is possible.