Epic Systems

Good food. Individual office. No commute traffic (if you accept no remote).

The company is like a country in the Middle Ages with a king/queen who only listens to good words. Internal meetings are all filled with unrealistic compliments, and there are fake external ratings on Epic. Your brain is being washed to only accept that filtered news. This affects middle and lower managers who also only look up, not down, pushing engineers to burnout.

The company is getting more and more bureaucratic in all processes. Everyone is burned out, so once I have the right to review your design or development, why should I do it quickly to keep the speed of the whole team? I'd let it sit there for a couple of days and only start my review after being badgered before the due time, and then kick the balls back and forth for rounds. But on the other side, if yours is being reviewed, then it worsens your burnout.

The root cause of burnout is understaffing. The root cause of understaffing is a lot of money wasted on the fancy campus, and Epic is private without big external funding. Epic is reinventing wheels. This is costly. The wheels invented here cannot be sold to other companies, so it is a one-time use. Epic doesn't benefit from the community of software, nor does it contribute to it. A lot of wheels are clunky to use since they are built by Epic only. For example, for the web migration, Epic builds a HyperspaceWeb layer, which you can think of as something like Node.js or similar. But such things can only succeed with talented engineers and thorough competition in the community. You can surely imagine how hard it is to code on such a framework for engineers. And not to mention that if you have questions, you have to ask staff inside Epic, and you will also be asked frequently and be the only one to answer, which further increases burnout.

There is no remote work chance, eliminating many outstanding candidates who don't want to relocate to Wisconsin. Many staff don't need to come to the campus at all. Even on campus, they are staying all day in their isolated offices, communicating by emails, phones, and Teams. Judy doesn't want to waste the investment on the campus, but I have a suggestion for her to eliminate such concerns. See below in my advice to management.

Judy, the campus build is already a sunk cost. It saves you money for most staff to work from home.

If you really don't want to waste the fancy buildings, you can turn most of them into a theme park. This would do good for the community and Wisconsin's culture prosperity, and you would make money from it.

Your staff will be happier, and your customers will be amazed.