Epic Systems

Epic has a lot of smart people working with other smart people who recognize not only what you do, but what you can do. Everyone becomes competent, knowledgeable, and helpful very quickly.

The compensation and benefits are excellent. You can wear jeans to work, and they hire liberal arts degrees.

Epic listens to good ideas, and if you're skilled, you can advance very quickly. Management has a sense of humor, and the policies have apparent rationales that make sense and involve very little corporate obfuscation.

You can take business trips with your meals, car, plane, and hotel all comped. They offer a month-long expenses-paid vacation after 5 years of work.

Epic is the industry leader, by far, and they know it.

For a lot of jobs at Epic, the hours can be long. I work 40-50 hours most weeks, but put in a week of 60 or more a few times a year.

The management structure is very flat, so if a title and concomitant underlings means more to you than more abstract respect and responsibilities, it might not be what you're looking for.

Unless you're a doctor, nurse, pharmacist, or rockstar software developer, you probably won't get hired too easily if you're over 30.

Verona and Madison are not middle of nowhere by any means, but they're not huge bustling centers either.

Consider being less inflexible about flying project teams back for staff meetings. If you can miss it for vacation, you can miss it for work. Keep up the good work.