Pros: You work with smart people who are trying their absolute best to make something great out of a dinosaur tech stack, which has a fun hacker feel to it when you're ignoring the impact of the technical debt. The food is actually pretty great.

Cons: - You are viewed as a replaceable unit of labor. - Management does not trust you or care about your wellbeing. - If you are struggling mentally or experiencing burnout, and you don't perform well, management will make no effort to intervene and help you out. - Some senior developers will treat you like you're dumb, when they probably couldn't get a job outside Epic at this point because they lack basic modern technical and conceptual developer skills. - The way HR pairs incoming new hires with teams doesn't make any sense, and makes them appear completely out of touch with what the company is even doing. - Management is out of touch with the reality of the industry and doesn't understand that they are fighting a losing battle in the long term. - Performance metrics are narrow and don't account for your whole job (while being subjectively weighted by high performers), despite affecting whether you get fired or not. - It's impossible to ask questions without feeling like you're wasting somebody's time, and communicating this with management rarely results in change. As soon as you start asking a reasonable amount of questions, you'll be accused of asking too many questions and not doing enough research on your own, which rarely makes any sense considering how poorly documented and designed most of the codebase is. - It appears that management doesn't possess the ability to self-reflect or empathize with coworkers. This is because most managers are picked from the pool of high performers, so they act more as gatekeepers of acceptable performance, despite obviously being biased against what an average acceptable workload should be. - The performance metric system just makes most developers petty and pits them against each other instead of fostering an environment for collaborative growth. - Most software developers writing web code are out of touch with modern web development and still think they're writing Visual Basic. They will try to make you rewrite JavaScript to include micro-optimizations that only apply to VB.

Pros: Great coworkers. Pay can be good. The job can be flexible depending on your role. Madison can be a pro or a con. You really are working on a product you can feel good about, and interacting with healthcare professionals and learning about what they do can be really fun and rewarding.

Cons: Patronizing culture. Upper management thinks they know best, and not all feedback is treated the same. There's a fair amount of opacity. For example, there's a ranking system that feeds into your raises and bonuses somehow. No one is allowed to know their rank, and feedback for employees around growth is filtered through this fact that they can't know what they're being compared against or what circumstances are holding them back if their manager isn't good at handling this type of feedback system. The type of development you're doing won't get you far elsewhere. Cache isn't used elsewhere, so the most translatable coding skills are if you work on web development. There's a lot of overtime. 45 hours is the average expectation. Not all teams/devs work that much, but there's a lot of expectation that to be excellent, you need to put in a lot of work, and you really need to be responsible for your own work/life balance. Epic has a lot of sink or swim mentality, and a feeling of "people couldn't make it" if they leave because they don't work well there, regardless of many of those people being successful devs elsewhere. At Epic, you're expected to manage your own project: define, scope, design, develop, and ensure testing timelines and quality are met, etc. There are other people who are also supposed to do these things, but ultimately, it's the developer's responsibility. This means a lot of pieces that are usually done by other roles at other companies are at least partly dev responsibilities at Epic. It means a lot of devs who "don't succeed" at Epic do succeed elsewhere, where they can focus on dev alone. This isn't always true at Epic, but I saw it enough to believe it's a trend.

Pros: Good pay. Good benefits. Great campus buildings. Good food.

Cons: No work/life balance. No recognition.