Epic Systems

• Compensation is great, especially for the cost of living in Madison.
• Great health insurance.
• Culinary is great and inexpensive.
• Campus is beautiful.
• Madison is a cool city.

The development process and tech stack are so niche that little of what you learn is transferable to other dev environments.

It can often feel like your job is not to be a developer but instead to be a master of Epic processes. So much of my time is spent dealing with in-house applications, internal processes, or dealing with some authority on either of those things that it's hard for me to feel like I'm growing as a developer. There's actually more bureaucracy involved here than in more traditionally structured companies that I've worked at.

Poor stance on bringing staff back to campus (which includes small, two-person office spaces) in the midst of COVID.

Epic leadership is intentionally opaque about how most decisions are made. This includes things like your raises (where a papal conclave-esque gathering of TLs occurs to rank you against other employees) and big picture, strategic decisions (where the sentiment typically feels like, "We decide and you deal with whatever we decide").

A common adage at Epic is that, "You need to know when to say no" - the idea being that you are in charge of your own work-life balance. This is good advice but revealing in that it shows how little regard Epic has for you, your work-life balance, and your happiness. Epic is perfectly content giving you more and more work until it becomes a problem for you and you have to say "stop" - something that is difficult for the often college-aged employees who are working their first full-time jobs. The idea that recent grads are expected to be able to effectively advocate and set boundaries for themselves in their first jobs or risk being wrung dry by their workload is ridiculous. Unsurprisingly, this leads to high turnover.

Following from that last bullet, you really are a drop in the bucket. Unless you give Epic a reason to care about you (very high-quality work or, more likely, willingness to work very long hours), they won't care about you.

You have to track your time in 15-minute increments.

Despite my complaints, I don't really have any advice for management. I honestly think most of these problems are so ingrained in how Epic works that there's no way they could be meaningfully changed. Epic is good at what they do – making healthcare software. I just don't like being a part of it.