Epic Systems

Most coworkers are amazing; intelligent and helpful. Food is tasty and convenient. Health insurance is great. Free juice, milk, coffee, tea, and popcorn are available in the break rooms. Salary feels like a major win at first.

Epic is about to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Upper management prioritizes three things: money, our customers’ upper managements’ happiness, and control. These are the things that drive their decisions. Time and time again in the history of Epic, and especially in the last couple years, they have shown their decisions will never be made for employee happiness, employee well-being, or morality alone. The only time we get lucky is if the customers and the staff want the same thing.

There is no avenue for employees to provide feedback to upper management and enact change. The feedback that does get through is flatly ignored or insultingly misconstrued. If there is a real problem, the only option you will have is to deal with it or quit.

This goes for culture and the workplace, but is starting to make its way into the software as well. I have noticed a great shift in the last couple years in the way we prioritize quality. Quality is now important only if it can be done by the project deadline. If not, well, you have two options.

Put your neck and performance review on the line at project deadline to say the project isn’t ready to ship yet and needs work, or put your neck on the line to say it’s good to go and ship it to customers, where issues found live will also impact your performance review. You will be pressured by TLs to say it’s done, but you are always the fall guy if it’s bad.

To new potential new hires looking to get a job at Epic, consider this:

• The cool campus novelty wears off in a month or two. Then the only thing you ever see is the four walls of your little office.
• The pay is great, but you’ll work 45 hours minimum. We’re hemorrhaging staff right now, so most of us work a lot more than that. If you calculate it, it makes the hourly rate you get paid a lot lower.
• We’re hemorrhaging staff. Employees are leaving the amazing pay and benefits en masse because the culture upper management is imposing sucks that much. When you start, you will be thrown into the deep end immediately because we need you, desperately. Customer-facing folks should expect to be assigned to multiple customers before you even understand how the software works yourself. You’ll learn as you go, or quit and have a mental break trying. Oh well, there’s another eager and unknowing recent college grad to replace you. Oh, and you won’t get a reference from us for your next job even if you did great work. Even if you were here for 15 years. Company policy.
• Epic is the monopoly on the EHR market, but that could change quickly if upper management continues to fumble internally for a couple years. Our customers will start to notice the decline in the quality of our software, and I think Google, Microsoft, and Amazon could catch up in the meantime. Especially with our lack of third-party integration that these companies will be able to dominate us with.

Do better. Do good by the people who actually make the company what it is.

Adapt to the times. It’s not 1985; you aren’t scrappy, and you’re not as quaint, cute, and Midwest as you used to be. You’re not staying competitive in the industry, and that could be the undoing of Epic.