Epic Systems

The people who stick around are very competent. The food is pretty nice, especially given the price. You will only share an office with one other person (supposedly we are all getting our own individual offices, but that never happened to me!). Hours can be flexible.

Depending on your team, stage of the release, and what's gone wrong lately, you can and will be expected to work as much as you need to meet crazy deadlines.

I have put in a full Friday, then gone back and tested 8 PM-5 AM. Sometimes these are legitimately necessary—if there's a problem that could impact safety and needs to get out ASAP—but often it's for a fairly arbitrary deadline.

You won't be learning skills that can transfer well (all my testing was manual, and the QA industry as a whole wants automated testing), and the vast majority of the training was not even relevant to my job.

You'll get much more focus on what you do wrong than what you do right, which makes getting better feel really unrewarding.

Sometimes the people who are promoted to TL seem to be chosen randomly, which can make a real difference when they have no talent or inclination but are making the decisions about what your team prioritizes and works on day-to-day.

The QA salary is not worth the workload (I am very jealous of those of my friends with overtime pay at other jobs).

This company also has a serious diversity problem. The situation for transgender employees only started improving recently, and there are multiple buildings on campus themed after "Africa" or "Asia," clearly decided on by some random white person.

You need to severely trim the fat from training and staff meetings. If a project doesn't affect safety, it has no place going into a release a month before deadlines start when it should have taken three phases. Don't act like you can have four to five months of insane deadlines to get back on track for release A and then turn around to try and do two phases of work for release B in one quarter without burning your employees out.

Please consider getting some diversity training as well.

For new TLs, everyone who regularly works with them (regardless of role) should be required to submit feedback, without fear of being identified to that TL.

Either hire more or decrease your expectations.