Epic Systems

Good food. Comfortable offices. Friendly staff (Midwest nice) who want to do the right thing until cynicism develops.

Inadequate transparency, if any, about performance assessments and compensation.

Unrealistic expectations. As a QA/Application Readiness, you will: train and mentor new hires; find, document, and investigate bugs; test complex software riddled with unexpected behaviors and false positives; write technical documentation in the form of setup guides, training materials, and other formats with different audiences/use cases; model system configuration; manage internal processes; maintain internal knowledge bases; provide floor support at install go-lives; manage development projects; write and monitor automated tests. Additionally, there are plans to pull you in as an "application specialist" for customer projects.

Do not expect to be able to "specialize" in a subset of these responsibilities, as the Careers page implies. Do not expect that delivering on any particular combination of these responsibilities will mean anything particular for your compensation.

Uneven growth opportunities across teams. Lately, this actually means that teams in need of more "opportunities" (work) set the direction for teams that are understaffed.

Out-of-touch management; a pattern of swapping out leads across unrelated applications.

Very young and inexperienced management.

No genuine effort to find the right person for the right job. "Trial by fire" attitude where expertise is deemed irrelevant and new staff are "thrown into the deep end" on high-stakes projects. Spoiler: This does not end well, ever.

Demoralized staff. I have seen an alarming number of departures of tenured workers with invaluable knowledge, especially over the past few months as a result of the Covid (non)response and perceived retaliation for "media leaks."

Poor work tools; you will not be working with industry-standard bug tracking/software versioning/revision control products, but rather a proprietary and very subpar tool with a backlog of much-needed enhancements and fixes.

The more tenured staff who have "survived" are usually more interested in positioning themselves comfortably than doing any meaningful mentoring of newer staff.

The Empress has no clothes. Brags about Epic not having budgets. Spends more effort on internal PR about Epic being a "good company" while setting national precedents on forced arbitration, to give just one example. Yes, a little bit like a cult.

Finally, do not believe what you see on the Epic Careers web page. Especially that bit about "specializing" in this or that. This is not how the company works. (And HR might really not even understand that).

Stop delegating process improvement to team members.

Challenge decisions from upper management instead of leaving your team members to get crushed.

Rise to the occasion and... lead.

Speak candidly. Be real.