Epic Systems

Your coworkers will generally be cooperative, helpful people who are good to be around.

For the cost-of-living of the Madison area, the pay is quite solid, and I have had good raises during the time I have been here.

The campus is a nice environment, but this is very minor.

If you have some intangible skills (luck?) at preventing yourself from being overloaded with work, you can have a pretty good time here.

Epic is pretty anti-worker rights. Notably, in Epic v. Lewis, Epic went to the US Supreme Court to avoid paying overtime to some of the not well-paid roles. This occurred during a pandemic response, where public health orders were the only thing preventing unnecessary exposure.

Whenever management is criticized, it cherry-picks statistics as reasons to defend its current stance and tries to frame things in ways to avoid the truth when it is not in favor of the company.

Work-life balance here is pretty mediocre-to-poor. I've been asked to work more hours for the simple reason of averaging 39 hours a week in a single month, despite being productive and on top of my work. Management cares less about how much work you actually get done (to an extent, you have to be at least doing something) and more about how much work you appear to be spending time on.

The total amount of time off is pretty weak (yes, even when taking the sabbatical once every 5 years into account). If you add it all together, it ends up being pretty mediocre if you compare it to other tech companies. Very few holidays are off when compared to other salaried jobs, and the vacation is on the low side.

Very little concrete transferable experience is gained due to working with outdated or proprietary technology stacks. At the time of writing, it is 2020. Why are my coworkers and I still reading and writing VB6 code? There's also the obscure server language of M, which is probably the least bad part of Epic's stack. The company is creating its own proprietary projects (TS2M, a React clone) which are improvements. However, you end up using something that mimics an industry standard when you could just work somewhere that uses an industry standard.

The core business is doing okay.

Don't micromanage things to death.

Acknowledge that you aren't perfect and demonstrate that you can course correct from mistakes instead of doubling down on them.