Epic Systems

Health benefits are good, provided you don't mind being locked into either the UW or SSM health systems.

You don't have copays on anything. But obviously, Epic hires young, so this benefit probably sounds better than it really is.

I guess there's some appeal if you just graduated from college and want to still feel like you're in college, except the dorms are replaced by tiny little offices (with an office-mate if you get a window, without an office-mate if your office is essentially a closet) that you work in for 50+ hours a week. But it's pretty obvious that the campus is both an act of extravagance on behalf of the owner and a way to lure in recent grads who have no idea what the standard expectations are at a job.

The only thing it has going for it is the salary. If you have a bachelor's degree and an awesome GPA, that may not be enough to even find a job that pays $50-60k a year (depending on what you majored in). Epic can start you out that way. But if you've been in the work world for a while or you have other options, this also isn't a pro.

BE WARNED: Even though they hire young, their recruiters are not above telling you they're hiring you based on your prior work experience. As a writer with years of experience, I had to start out with months of training on "how to write" – waste of time, an insult, and full of such bad programming that it confused me on what the expectations were and started me out poorly.

You better want to work at Epic forever, because you can't really transfer your skills, depending on which position you take.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but the main ones are: they use a very old coding language called MUMPS that you won't be able to use anywhere else. And there's a non-compete for similar companies and doing Epic consulting for a hospital, etc.

So, if you don't like it here and don't have much experience elsewhere, you could find yourself stuck.

They're very anti-labor. Epic's name is on a Supreme Court lawsuit from a few years back that basically makes it impossible to sue your employer in a class-action suit, part of what organized labor would need to do. Because of that win, they're insanely cavalier with how they treat their employees.

The top example here is obviously how they wanted to force us back to the office during peak COVID, but there's also the fact they got rid of QA, tech comm, and some other teams, fused them together, and created this Quality Manager position. Totally changed the job description. Not even legal in some states to do that to people. It put me in a horrible spot.

Moving on... there is a very strange culture at Epic, I'll put it that way.

The half-day staff meetings employees have to attend are a good example. At each one, Judy is the headline speaker, and she gets up there and seems to just freestyle about whatever. Long ramblings, given to this completely silent crowd of 10,000 people.

Oh, and this all takes place four floors underground in an amphitheater modeled after the one the Mormon Tabernacle Choir uses. Then you're made to tell your team leader what you liked about the staff meeting. It's just weird.

Especially when you consider how much it costs the company every month to have this meeting. Four hours of 10,000 people's time is pricey. It's just so clearly an exercise in vanity by the owner.

Culture among the other employees is awful. You'll witness so much brown-nosing and sucking up to mid-management you will want to claw your eyes out sometimes, but then you'll hear those same folks' disappointment at how the company continues to treat them despite their efforts.

They don't care about their employees, evidenced by wanting to send us back in August during a huge COVID spike because "we have to come back sometime." Epic came very close, in my opinion, to being a big COVID vector for the state of Wisconsin, and it seemed to be just because the owner of the company was pushing for it.

After all, she's spent so much money on her campus, and there are new themed areas being built, including one office building that will somehow look like/have its interior themed after a shipwreck.

The shipwreck may be an apt metaphor for Epic itself in the future. It's like the Titanic: unsinkable. But from what I saw during my time there, there's some serious rot internally. And just looking at the health care industry right now, it seems like Epic has likely peaked and will be losing market share to new startups and established tech companies.

And they'll deserve to lose, because they've had every opportunity to right the ship and focus on morale rather than squashing any employee that steps "out of line" in their minds.

I'm just glad I won't be there for it.

Oh, also: they don't care about diversity and inclusion, despite making some noises suggesting they do. They'll actually threaten you in a BCC email if you plan to make any sort of statement (this actually happened just after George Floyd).

This is the whitest place I've worked, but at the same time, I guess Madison is the whitest place I've lived, so maybe that's just part of the deal.

Rate people based on the quality of their work, not their speed. The software itself, to say nothing of the bugs, is just bad in many areas right now. Give teams the time they need to get everything up to shape before sending out code. The poor quality gets noticed.

Finally, you should know that your training/orientation is really bad and horribly inefficient as far as getting employees up to speed on what they actually will be doing as their job. The lengthy training just makes things more confusing than getting hands-on with the software testing workflow right away would be.

Also, maybe take into consideration that when you threaten to make your employees go into a COVID incubator and then sort of fire and rehire a good portion of the company with new job duties, without their consent, you are demoralizing your workers.

It results in a huge hit to productivity, in my opinion. I definitely worked hard every minute of the day, harder than I think most do in white-collarish type jobs, but the more I felt the company didn't care about any of us, the less I cared about them. I still did my best to do my job, but my point is you have to give respect to get it back; fear alone is not enough for your continued success.