Epic Systems

If you're like me, you might have trouble getting a job straight out of college due to lack of experience. Epic is a great starting place, and if you have a good academic record, you have a good shot at getting in. The benefits are nice, especially the healthcare costs. Your coworkers will be fantastic; I've never worked with a group of such competent people as I did at Epic.

If you do the bare minimum expectations in QA, your acquired skills won't translate very well to other software companies. Epic QA is almost all about manual testing.

If you're hoping to stay in the software QA industry after Epic, you'll almost need to get some programming experience and do some automated testing experience.

They will allow you to get the education from there to do automated testing, but as a QAer, your job is to get your manual testing done. Then you can work on automated testing in your extra time.

This structure makes it difficult to get much automated testing done, and you'll most likely be using a programming language used almost exclusively in the healthcare industry.

So even with some automated testing experience, it can be a little challenging to move elsewhere.

There is a software test engineer role you can transfer to that does exclusively automated testing, but it requires multiple college programming classes that wouldn't help you with the language you're programming in, and passing a programming test.

This was more hoops than I was willing to jump through to get the increased paycheck at Epic. I focused on manual testing for my first 18 months, then got as much experience in automated testing in the next 15 months as I could before moving on because the automation did not have any positive effect on my raise, which is ridiculous due to the increased skill level needed for automated testing.

We modified/added 7 million lines of code in 2015. That's a lot of changes, and regression testing will be more and more important in the future. You need to put a stronger focus on automated testing.

I tried to help out as a QAer but was rewarded with the smallest raise in the time I was there. Automated testers are typically valued higher than manual testers in the software QA industry. The transfer to STE to get the pay bump I felt I deserved has unnecessary requirements for those who have already made great contributions to automated testing. It was easier to just leave to get a 15%+ pay bump than it was to take a year to satisfy these requirements.

Instead of only evaluating people by their qualifications on paper, consider having a TL override system where, if multiple developer and QA TLs approve, a QAer can transfer to STE. The TLs surrounding the QAers know their work much more than HR.