Epic Systems

Meaningful work -- If you're the kind of person energized by doing socially valuable work, this is a good place.

High responsibility for low experience -- Very few companies will allow recent-college-graduates as much responsibility and advancement as fast as Epic will. After a year working here, I became a Team Lead and was running projects of upwards of 20 people. This can be a con too (see cons) but in terms of career development, Epic gave me fantastic skills in a short amount of time.

The standards for hiring at Epic are absurdly high. This means you'll be consistently working with extraordinarily smart people. Motivation levels vary, but in general those people are committed to their jobs and doing well at them.

It's always mentioned, but the food is fantastic. I miss the cafeteria so much.

Breadth of opportunities out there is great. One day, you might be presenting to 100 people, the next working with VBA Macros in Excel, the next testing a new database report. Epic stresses that 'your career is what you make it' and this is absolutely true for the company.

The Team Leads for QA are a really strong group with excellent leadership.

The culture here is a double-edged sword (see hours, etc.), but in general is a really positive force on work experience. I felt proud to work for Epic and do the work I was doing.

Philosophy is 'do your work, regardless of how much time it takes to do it.' This is fine by itself, as it allows for flexibility, but it results in unrealistic commitments to projects that cause long hours, even for lower-stress jobs. This causes burnout for a lot of folks who aren't able to manage their commitments.

Heavily process-oriented with minimal room for innovative movement. As a large company, you won't find much opportunity to find creative process solutions.

Tools for projects and processes that are utilized are mostly internally developed. This means (for those who leave) a lack of experience using the standard tools of the trade. For example, in 2.5 years I never touched Microsoft Project, Visual Studio, Test Manager, HP Quality Center, Team Foundation Server, Selenium, QTP, or any of the other really common tools for QA.

Salaries (for QA) are not competitive once beyond 'entry level' experience. Starting salary is commensurate with the market, but because there are no pay-grade raises, even generous raises result in slow salary growth. Let me be clear: If you're just out of college, these salaries are competitive. If you excel at this job, however, you'll be making less than you should after a couple years.

The culture of work needs to change. Judy's philosophy may be that "there's no such thing as work/life balance," but more and more, employment for late Generation Y and Generation X is about balance and controlled hours.

Business threats posed by AthenaHealth and other light competitors aren't a joke. When was the last innovative, successful software system you heard of that was built on a large enterprise platform? Epic risks becoming the next Microsoft (fading and becoming the 'ugly stepsister,' despite continued business viability) if it can't completely change its foundation from the heavy system it is right now.