Epic Systems

Good pay (although raises/bonuses are a total black box, and it seems that some people get shafted in this department). Excellent culinary (although not what it once was). Cool campus. Smart and friendly co-workers.

Low bar for development (at least on my team) - many codebases are hacked together conglomerates of garbage from 5, 10, or 20 years ago. Management will actively refuse to delegate time or resources to re-write or refactor this code, leading to frustratingly difficult and long development times. This also includes being asked/forced to cut corners in your own development, so if you are someone that takes pride in writing good, clean, performant code, this can cause a lot of friction.

Tech stack is pretty lousy. For most of the application teams, you'll work in C#.NET with vanilla Typescript (or Javascript if you're unlucky) and a no-SQL language called M that's hardly used outside of Epic. Possibly some minimal exposure to an Epic-specific flavor of React. Some teams use more SQL, and there are mobile-facing teams as well, but the biggest part of the company is vanilla TS/JS and M backend. No Git, we still use SVN. No Jira, we have a terrible in-house product called EMC2. No unit testing, minimal automated testing. From a tech perspective, you likely won't learn too many transferable skills here.

Complete lack of support or options for work-from-home, remote meetings, or really any flexibility at all. Even meetings that are perfectly suited to a web cast, such as the required monthly all-hands meeting, are mandatory to attend in person. This meeting will provide little to nothing of value for your day-to-day work, unless you are interested in obscure insurance legalese or equally obscure grammar tips & tricks from Judy, but it WILL waste 3 hours of your Monday.

Upper and middle management is wildly out of touch with the reality of workers' day-to-day life. Management is very fond of saying things like "web migration is over, we are going to see an explosion of new development in the coming months", when in reality they have been saying this for years and the promised new development has yet to even start. In the same vein, they instituted a policy where developers can take one day per month to fix something that they think is worthwhile, but in reality, developers are too busy fixing bugs and investigating poorly documented one-off customer crashes to ever take advantage of this "benefit".

No opportunity for advancement, unless you want to become a manager. There are no official "senior", "staff", "architect", "tech lead", "L1/L2/L3", etc. positions. You simply do the same work forever, with no official change in responsibilities and no say in bigger picture or longer-term decisions, even if you are the technical expert in the area (these decisions are all made by low- to mid-level managers, most of whom haven't written code in 5+ years).

Company is also wildly understaffed at current. Teams are experiencing massive bug backlogs, which means that nobody is getting to work on fun projects or cool new stuff (I had gone ~1.5 years without working on a project), and the company has declined to hire more employees to fill this gap. This had led to a downward spiral of attrition, as tenured employees get tired of working on boring stuff, so they leave, which just leaves even more boring stuff left for the remaining employees, so they leave too, etc., etc.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend working here as a developer unless...

• You are not a super ambitious person and are content to do mid-tier work with minimal advancement opportunity indefinitely, OR
• You have no other (competitive) offers or options

Move into the 21st century and offer modern benefits.

Flexible work, remote meetings, paid abortion visits.

Get rid of the ridiculous non-compete.

Hire some more culinary staff!

Put a bigger emphasis on engineering good, modern software, instead of slap-dash fixes to random customer demands.