Epic Systems

If you don't have any professional experience in customer service, consultancy, or healthcare infrastructure, you will gain a lot of experience.

If you like hands-off management, figuring out for yourself how to survive, battling constant crises, and representing healthcare IT expertise with sparse training, then you'll enjoy working at Epic.

If you like to work and don't have much of a life after work, then you'll enjoy working at Epic.

If you're young and prefer to make friends at work, there are a lot of young people at work, and it will be pretty easy to make friends.

If you're a decent person, you will make friends with your clients too. Healthcare organizations do love working with Epic people. You'll be grinding through a lot of problems together, and it lends to quality bonding.

Madison, Wisconsin is genuinely a wonderful town. Lots of events and activities, accessible by foot and bicycle, great bar and restaurant scene, simply delightful. If Epic had been kinder with the work/life balance, I would have stayed just to stay in Madison.

;tldr If you're coming here for reviews after visiting the campus for an interview, the gist is this: what Epic appears to be -- a fun-loving, hip, innovative company -- and what Epic is in the day-to-day are not the same. Epic is a massive corporation, and its goal is to make money. So, do your research before signing on!

Epic tries to have a start-up culture, but because it's a 10,000+ employee organization, it cannot be a start-up. There are protocols and rules and barriers to innovation and mobility. They say that they love having so many new and young people come in with fresh eyes, but my experience showed that they are very resistant to change. People get in the groove of doing certain things in certain ways, and unless you can prove, on your own time and effort, that your tasks are, for example, a significant waste of time and money, then nothing happens. The culture is not innovative and does not prioritize quality-of-life improvements.

Management is not great, because most of the managers have less than 2 years' experience being a manager. That's because once an employee has been there for a year doing whatever they're doing, and they perform decently, then they're pressured to become a manager. Now Epic has all these managers who don't know anything about team-building, team solidarity, or being good listeners. Epic managers tend to be gatekeepers. They're there to make sure that you're performing, and if not, prod you to perform more, work more, take more responsibility, and so on.

If you don't have professional experience, are new to customer service, new to healthcare IT infrastructure, or don't know anything about clinical workflows, the first six months are genuinely brutal. Listen, brother, sister. The first six months are absolutely brutal. With only barebones training, you will be assigned to be the Epic/clinical/software expert to real hospital IT staff who are responsible for the healthy functioning of the healthcare software. You will have imposter syndrome, because you will actually be an imposter. Even though you will have your manager and a mentor to help you, they will often be too busy to fill in the training gap. Real people will be counting on you to give them professional, accurate consulting that will impact the safety of real patients. If you're okay taking on that responsibility in your third month, then all the power to ya. For me, I couldn't sleep for a year.

Epic does not have a healthy culture of work/life balance. Instead, and I'm speaking both from personal experience and from relationships with coworkers, Epic actively pushes employees to spend an absurd number of hours per day (11.5 for example!). Epic does not reward good work with better work; they reward it with more work. If you're half decent at your job, your manager will push you to work no less than 45 hours per week. If you're really good at your job, then you will be pushed to work 50-60 hours per week. When giving feedback to a manager about "being stressed" or "having too much to do," instead of lightening your load, they'll pressure you to become more efficient at your work, when the real problem is simply that the load of responsibility is too great, and you can't do everything yourself.

If you're saying something to yourself like, "I'll start off as a Technical Support engineer or whatever, and then when I show that I'm a good worker, I'll move into a position that I'm more interested in." Don't count on it. Epic has an agenda. If you fit into its agenda in a certain position, you won't make it out for years.

If you're not a young white person, then you'll be in the small minority.

If you choose to work at Epic, bear in mind that for at least a year after a departure, you will not be able to work for any healthcare organization that uses Epic. So all that experience you gain learning healthcare IT, clinical workflows, etc., you will be hard-pressed to use it after Epic.

I've already given this feedback in person, but to reiterate:

• Epic needs more comprehensive training before assigning new employees to customers. It's so incredibly stressful to be responsible for their patients' safety with only two months of training. Also, I would argue, it's unethical.

• Epic needs more comprehensive training for managers. Managers at Epic don't know how to manage effectively. I didn't feel like I was on a team; I felt like I was on a treadmill.