Epic Systems

• High pay for the Midwest
• Good benefits (health insurance, sabbatical)
• Good, cheap food offered for lunch
• Awesome campus: Themed buildings, private offices, and free juice in the break rooms
• A chance to make an impact in healthcare (depending on your app)

As you can see, there are a lot of pros to Epic. Before the pandemic, I would have likely given them a 4 or 5-star review. As it stands, their current policy regarding the pandemic outweighs all the perks of the job.

Starting with the non-pandemic cons:

• TLs generally have an incentive to overwork you. If you meet all of your expectations, you will be rewarded with more work. You have to be pretty forceful and say no if you want any semblance of a work-life balance. It can be a stressful situation.
• Your experience at Epic will largely be determined by who your TL is. Some of them are helpful and good at managing; others, not so much.
• There's a lack of transparency to how you are evaluated, and how certain processes come into place.
• There are some outdated technologies in our tech stack.

And then there's the pandemic.

Epic was slow to respond when COVID-19 first hit the US. Upper management referred to it as "the flu" and were hesitant to let employees work from home. They finally caved and let some employees work from home in late March, but tried to guilt us into working on campus.

Starting in the summer, Epic began to make plans to force everyone back to campus, even as the number of new cases were increasing locally and nationally. Employees tried to speak up through internal channels, but were promptly shut down. The only "allowed" way to give feedback was through a private email group, where your concerns could be brushed aside. Managers who spoke up with concerns about the return-to-work policy were demoted. It took media coverage and complaints to the county health department to get Epic to even consider revising their plan of forcing everyone back to campus.

Now, to their credit, it seems like they have made some good changes on campus to support safety. If it were essential for us to be working on campus at this time, the changes would be sufficient. But we don't need to work on campus to accomplish our jobs. We're a tech company.

Forcing 10,000+ employees onto campus during the peak of a pandemic is irresponsible and dangerous, not only to employee health, but to the greater community. Epic should be a leader in making adjustments to keep everyone safe during this unprecedented time. Instead, they have silenced dissenters and spread lies (claiming only a "vocal minority" is concerned with their plans) to get their way, at the expense of our health.

This is all very sad. It's not the Epic I know, and directly contradicts our motto of "Do Good".

Actually listen to your employees, especially when it comes to the safety and health of us and our families.

Don't just pretend to encourage feedback; actually survey us for our opinions and then make changes based on that feedback.