Epic Systems

Epic does hire great people -- you can generally trust your coworkers to try to help you and to do the right thing.

Healthcare coverage is excellent for single people.

Lots of fringe benefits, like great food and a casual dress code.

Madison is a great place to live.

There are some opportunities to do very interesting things that can have a major impact, since Epic has such a large reach.

If you are a liberal arts graduate, you can likely make more money in QA at Epic than you would at most other places that would hire you immediately after graduation.

Working in QA at Epic is pretty thankless and doesn't really lead to other job opportunities.

There is a constant crisis mentality and, while there are cool opportunities available, you don't really get the time that would be needed to explore them.

Management is very hit or miss, and there are no real opportunities to advance.

While the pay and raises can be generous, your title and official job description won't change over time.

Your responsibilities may be hard to describe outside of Epic because of how Epic runs differently than other similar companies.

The type of testing that Epic QA does does not generally transfer to other jobs. You will always be a second-class employee after the software developers.

Create more ways for QAers to advance within the company.

Give more vacation time.

Staff high-profile projects at the levels that they actually need.

Give managers (and maybe other staff too) more training in things like projecting staffing needs and being realistic about setting goals, so people don't realize midway through massive projects that they're not going to get done on time.

If you ask staff to go above and beyond (working over a weekend, severely extended hours, other extreme circumstances), give them some kind of reward (bonus, vacation time, work-from-home days, free lunch for a week, something).