Epic Systems

Casual work environment, fantastic food, and the campus is absolutely incredible. It's easy to make friends if you're fresh out of college, which you probably are. Great pay for right out of college. Madison is awesome. Good experience in certain apps. You'll definitely get another job after your non-compete expires if you can't find anything outside the industry.

Expectations don't match reality. Older project managers and sales make promises before seeing the data or even checking if what they're promising is possible. Projects then get escalated because expectations are being missed.

Escalations do nothing but increase your workload. They just create additional meetings and pull people off of other projects, which will also get escalated later because those people got pulled off.

The workload is ridiculous (on certain apps and newer teams; some are okay). I averaged around 60 hours a week during my time there, with a peak of 120 hours a week. I know you probably went to some high-tier engineering school, got a great GPA, and 'thrive' off of hard work, but trust me, so did I, and I still almost cracked. It's very different when hugely expensive projects and patients' safety are on the line.

Each time I asked for a week off, I had to work 80+ hours the week before. I wasn't actually getting time off; I was just squeezing two weeks' worth of work into a single week. They once canceled a vacation the day I was supposed to leave, and another time they didn't approve it until 8 p.m. the night before after I had worked over 100 hours straight to meet an impossible timeline some higher-up promised without asking if it was even possible.

They also told me to work over Easter weekend. They didn't ask if I had plans. They didn't ask if I thought I'd go to hell if I didn't observe Easter Sunday (I don't, but that's besides the point). Nope, they just told me they'd check in at 10 a.m. Sunday to see where I was at.

Constant useless meetings made it impossible to get anything done. 80% of my code was written outside of regular business hours, and the average commit time was around 1 a.m. Surprise! That code was riddled with bugs. Maybe give your employees time to actually work, and you won't have so many escalations.

I knew people who took PTO to catch up on work to avoid meetings.

The number of times I was told 'this might be a nights and weekends type of thing' was infuriating.

They fire people for no reason. A friend of mine worked 80 hours a week on a project to barely push it through on the ridiculous timeline someone else promised. After the successful conclusion of the project, they fired him because he 'hadn't managed his time effectively.'

They might be evil or don't understand the ramifications of their actions: Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis.

It's really hard to get out when you keep missing interviews to be pulled into some patient safety emergency. This happened multiple times, even when I asked for a vacation day to do it.

Their technical debt is absurd. A new company with a ton of funding built on a modern tech stack could blow them out of the water.

Let the foot soldiers give input on whether projects are possible and get data before making promises.

Give more vacation, and actually have it be vacation rather than squeezing more work into the week prior.

A culture where you are expected to log a minimum of 45 hours a week, not including lunch, is toxic.

Check whether what your lawyers are doing at the Supreme Court is actually moral and keep them from screwing over the entire American workforce.

Hire a ton of experienced people or a consulting firm rather than new grads to deal with modernizing your tech stack and reduce your technical debt. If you don't, you'll be in serious trouble in 20 years.