Epic Systems

Gorgeous campus, restaurant-quality food, almost perfect health insurance, help available when you are confused, two monitors, hotel points, airplane miles, normally wear casual clothes (not whatever you want, though - don't believe HR on that).

Epic is a mess. Work-life balance doesn't exist, and you'll be working with ancient software. HR will tell you that you'll work 60-80% of the hours that you actually work. If you think that all of the Glassdoor reviews are just people griping about their long hours, just like the rest of corporate America, you are wrong. At Epic, you have to account for every 15 minutes of your day and what output you've produced in that time. You get passive-aggressive emails from Accounting if you haven't logged all of your time by the last day of the month. If most of the disgruntled corporate American cubicle dwellers actually wrote down how they helped the company every 15 minutes, they'd find that they probably actually work less than most Epic employees.

Work whenever actually means that business hours are 8 AM to 6 PM, but you're allowed to go to the dentist on occasion, if you take sick leave and get it approved by your boss. At least you don't have to wait to take sick leave, unlike vacation! You can only take vacation after 6 months at the company. Do you want to go to your cousin's wedding in Key West 5 months in? You don't have vacation time for that. After 6 months, your workload will grow so much that you won't want to take vacation time, in the interest of not finding absolute carnage when you come back. You'll still be assigned all of your normal work – you just won't be present to do it, so have fun being doubled up for a bit.

TS get to work as many hours as their customers want them to. When you finally get things to a point where you can work 45 hours a week, they'll give you two more customers.

You will never get your own office. You will always have an officemate, unless you become "senior" enough to merit your own office. The only people who I've seen have their own offices are some TLs and HR/Admin (that includes Judy).

The prototype of Cadence was written in the 1970s by Judy, and her bugs still exist. No matter how often Judy and Carl insist that Epic is new, innovative, etc., don't believe them. It's a falsely friendly atmosphere – case in point, calling the CEO and President by their first names. We have a first-name culture at Epic, but you will never personally speak to either of them outside of the 4-hour corporate philosophy class that you take in your first 6 months, taught by the CEO.

Microsoft deprecated Visual Basic 6 a while back, but lucky you, you'll still be able to work with it. HyperspaceWeb is actually written in languages that people use, but it kills performance and also constantly goes down. You'll find that things crash and go down frequently at this software company.

Your boss will ask everyone that you work with for feedback. If you get one bad review from someone who hates you, it'll be an area to improve ("the next step in your career growth"). Your boss will make you work even more with that person, until one day you are surrounded on all of your projects by people who actively hate you enough to talk to your boss about it. If you protest, expect more work to be shoveled onto your plate in retaliation.

A lot of people complain about the inability to grow their careers during exit interviews. Epic has responded by calling a lot of things at the company "career growth." None of those things are actually growth, except for the rare professional development opportunity that comes to the luckiest. Talking to job candidates on the phone is good "growth." Getting certified in another Epic application is growth, although you won't actually have the time for it. Your TL is supposed to talk to you about balancing it, but what actually happens is that you have every ounce of your normal work week, plus the hours of certification classes that you signed up for, and the homework and projects.

Same goes for the times that you travel. Want to go on a go-live (in QA, you are required to do 2 per year)? Have fun flying out on Sunday or Monday, waking up at 6 AM, driving to the hospital, standing on your feet from 7 AM to 7 PM (you aren't allowed to sit – it's against Epic policy, because you're not "engaged"), then coming home to your hotel room to try to do your workload that normally fills your 9-11 hour average day – until Thursday, when they will fly you home in planes full of people with Epic gear, frantically typing away on their Lenovo laptops. Guess what you have on Friday? All the meetings that you weren't in Wisconsin for get pushed back to when you are on campus, plus all of the work that you weren't able to do when you shut your laptop and flopped into bed at midnight for the past few nights, where you promptly have insomnia about how much work you have to do. Have fun driving into the ghost campus on Saturday trying to catch up! Maybe the sounds of happy children climbing onto the tractor in the Shed will make you feel better about being sleep-deprived and 30 hours behind on last week's work. That's almost every week for IS. If you like flying out on Sunday, working, flying in on Thursday night, and frantically trying to catch up, accept your IS offer.

The free food after 7 PM and on weekends is predicated on you staying for a while. You can't eat and leave. You have to work at minimum until 8 PM. It's also boxed up in non-meal format; that is to say, there will be trays of fajita vegetables, not a taco-fixing spread. The free food doesn't work like that. You also have to sign your name on a sheet, and you're not really allowed to take more than one choice. Like I said, fajita vegetables.

QA and dev don't normally speak to each other. It's a struggle, because QA will write QA notes that put developers into Quality Hold, where they can't develop anything new. They are two roles that are black boxes to each other.

QA, Travel, and Tech Comm are the worst-paid roles at the company. The devs make 200% of what a normal QAer makes for the same hours. QA and Tech Comm are also normally lower stress, though that can depend on your place in the company. Some Tech Comm spend their entire lives trying to chase down people for release note approval and wait patiently at 5 PM on a Friday for the click of a button that never comes.

Stop overworking people.

Plan for every employee to work 40 hours a week and hire a new person if four employees are working 50 hours per week.

Make TLs more accountable than a TL Swap once a year. They need to be accountable at all times.

Have better ways for all employees to speak up the chain of command. Technically, anyone can email Carl, but the people telling us that we could also told us that we shouldn't ever do it.