Epic Systems

The food is amazing, the campus is nice (although traffic and parking is a nightmare). The pay is decent and apparently it is increasing. The benefits are very good. Epic has a huge share of the market and honestly has the best product out there. They aren't going anywhere and your job should be safe for as long as you want it. They are desperate for developers.

HR does not tell the truth about what you will actually be doing. Depending on what team you get placed on, the code ranges from slightly broken to profoundly broken. You will almost certainly not work with .NET. You will work with Cache (also known as MUMPS) and VB6.

These are old, unsexy languages that struggle to work with modern technologies. Epic works around these limitations by being "clever" (which should set off warning bells like a depressurizing submarine). Most of their tools are homegrown or obsolete because no one supports Cache and VB6 anymore.

It's possible to work 40-hour weeks by not volunteering for anything. You will work on the most boring bug fixes that they have. If you volunteer for anything, your workload will increase to the 50-60 hr/week zone, trying to integrate new development into the incredibly finicky and interconnected codebase.

Basically, it's a boring, frustrating job with questionable management and the potential for major overwork. They have a massive backlog of bugs that need to be addressed as they slowly begin to modernize their code.

You claim to hire young, passionate, skilled programmers who like a challenge, which is reasonably accurate. You then run them through a mediocre, one-size-fits-all training program and proceed to dump profoundly frustrating bug fixes on them until they give up.

In my year at Epic, I did not meet a single young developer with a positive outlook on their role, career, or the codebase in general. If you keep trying to hire the best, they will want something more interesting than applying band-aids in the worst parts of your codebase. "Developer at Epic" is not the same job as lawyer, doctor, firefighter, or other dream job. People will not sit through two years of drudgery to prove themselves and reach a point where the job doesn't suck. They will leave and find another development job that doesn't suck.

Also, consider hiring people with actual management experience. I really didn't have much faith in management, from my role up to the president of the company, really having a firm grasp on how to best utilize their developers or maintain a real plan moving forward.