Pros: If you're young and just out of college, Epic is hard to beat. The median age is probably less than thirty, as most people here are either just graduated with a bachelor's or master's degree. The campus is simply beautiful. Most employees have an office with a door, and many new employees even have their own offices. Those who are in satellite facilities and have cubicles will be moved to Verona as soon as the new campus buildings are completed. They also work very hard at training new staff in existing software and development techniques. The system is huge, but the initial training helps bridge a lot of that gap. If you work there five years, you get a paid, month-long sabbatical, and if you use it to travel abroad, Epic will help defray some of that cost. The sabbatical is in addition to two weeks paid vacation a year. Finally, the benefits are very nice (90% of health, dental, and disability paid), and they start you off with a 50%/6% contribution to a ROTH 401k. By the way, the salary is pretty nice, too.

Cons: If you're not young and just out of college, you might feel out of place among all these younger people. Finding colleagues your age might be a bit more difficult in this case. They ask long hours of their project management staff. While that is to be expected to some degree, they can really pile on at times (we give a lot of support to our customers, and it requires more manpower than we are sometimes equipped to give). If you're a developer, you have to work in VB6 and MUMPS. The latter especially could lead to career roadblocks later, not to mention being incredibly frustrating, since MUMPS is a typeless language, does not ignore whitespace, and has little to no error handling. On a benefits note, the 401k contribution isn't fully vested for two years, which could be a little annoying. Perhaps the most annoying is that since Judy absolutely refuses to open Epic's financials to the SEC, the number of equity stakeholders is capped at 500, since having more than that would require filing statements with the SEC.

Pros: Able to pick projects. The work is interesting. I like the people I work with on my team.

Cons: Upper management has had an extremely poor response to COVID and is unwilling to engage in dialogue with employees.

Pros: Meaningful mission: You're writing software to help save people's lives. There's a general drive and urgency to keep up with the ever-expanding demands of healthcare professionals, and it can be pretty rewarding. Ownership: You are given a lot of power to own and shape your own projects. It's very likely that you will become the foremost company expert on one or more functional areas in just a few years. Food: Culinary at Epic is AWESOME. Food is outstanding and affordable. Campus: It's cool; showing your friends and family around can be fun. But as an employee, you probably won't have much time to enjoy it, so don't consider it a major perk. COVID: Epic's response has produced an absolute ton of high-quality memes.

Cons: Managers can be hit or miss. Some are excellent, some less so. Work/life balance can be hard to maintain. If you're not a person that's comfortable saying "no" sometimes, you could easily become overworked. Minimal effort is put into writing *good* code. If you care a lot about coding style, good architecture, or maintainable frameworks, then maybe look elsewhere. Epic hires a lot of people that don't care about these things at all, and it's reflected in their codebase. Likewise, if you want to code in super trendy languages or frameworks; you won't find those here. Covid response has been unbelievably terrible. Management has gaslighted us, lied to us, censored us, broken promises, intentionally misinterpreted the governor's Covid order, wasted company resources, hired lapdogs to promote their plan, and demoted and/or fired people who disagree with them, all in the name of trying to get people back to working on campus as soon as possible. Quite frankly, it's unbelievable how much effort they've put into this, and without sharing any objective reason for doing so. It would take an entire book to describe all the terrible things that have been done.