Epic Systems

The salary is decent for an entry-level position.

Health insurance is virtually unmatched.

Other employers are impressed by your past work experience. A job at Epic is evidence that you can work hard and pick up new skills quickly.

You will quickly learn very important and highly transferable business skills such as:

• Project management
• Delegation
• How to hold effective meetings
• How to work on a team
• Organization/time management skills

• Stress
• Limited PTO
• Manipulative and unhealthy corporate culture
• Everyone is so overworked that teams constantly play hot-potato with responsibility and process-ownership.

In his book "The Design of Everyday Things," Don Norman provides numerous compelling examples of the unhealthy and fallacious instinct to blame humans rather than processes for any given failure. The point that emerges from his extensive discussion is that failures do not usually happen because individuals are lazy or incompetent. Rather, failures inevitably happen because of unreasonable work conditions.

In other words, failures typically are symptoms of SYSTEMIC problems rather than the unpreventable result of natural variations between employees. Even those among us with the strongest work ethic or the highest expertise are disposed to failure when they become overworked.

Despite this book being on Epic's internal recommended reading list, the company seems incapable of taking its message to heart. Epic is unrelentingly fine-tuning the efficiency of its production, maximizing the labor while minimizing the laborers (as a general policy, it will only consider hiring additional team members if the average number of weekly hours per team member is greater than 50 AND the team is still unable to accomplish its most essential tasks).

Failures to deliver on deadlines is invariably treated as a personal problem, rather than a failure of the processes. If the failure of any arbitrary part in a factory could cause the overall failure of the entire factory's production, then we might consider that to be a badly designed factory.

Similarly (though obviously not in every respect, as humans are not robot-arms), a team/house/app/etc. in which every single individual is simultaneously a bottleneck is a recipe for disaster. But when disaster strikes, as it inevitably does, it is your failure to manage time or prioritize tasks or escalate problems correctly, rather than problems that should be expected given the nature of the processes that govern our workdays.

My disillusionment with this company is completed by its COVID-19 response. The COVID-19 policies are decided by a secret Illuminati of executives, with zero accountability or direct interaction with those who are affected by their decisions; while our feedback is officially encouraged, the role that that feedback actually plays in the legislation of policy is deeply mysterious and opaque.

The general impression is that Epic has decided the facts for itself: apparently its "culture of collaboration" is more important than the health, safety, and well-being of its employees, our families, and the health of the broader public. While disagreement was tolerated at first, now it is silenced for the official reason that it is no longer "productive." My best guess as to the actual reason is that it is bad for morale and is actively harmful to their ability to hire and maintain new robot-arms.

Unfortunately, Epic is just another business, and the superficially virtuous motive of saving lives is consistently leveraged as the ultimate way to guilt its employees into unreasonable workloads, maximizing productivity while minimizing costs.

Words are meaningless without action. "Do good" cannot just mean "do good by the customer." You have to do good by your employees and community, too.