Epic Systems

Great health insurance. One of the best if not the best in the US. Good pay because it's in a low cost of living area. Great food (but not free).

I am going to try my best to give my honest opinion here. It might appear biased, but I tried to justify every point with my personal experiences. I have read through the existing reviews here on Glassdoor and also spoke with a ton of coworkers. This review is from the perspective of a software developer.

1. The work You get to interact with "Epic" no matter which team you are on. This is a monolithic piece of desktop software that was built in VB6 (yes, Visual Basic). The back-end database is based on MUMPS. They have been trying for years to transition to the web using a custom JavaScript framework, but even that is supposed to work inside a custom desktop app and not a generic browser. The healthcare industry is known for using a notoriously outdated tech stack, and taking a peek behind the curtain will show you that this is true.

The work is challenging because you will need to work with legacy code, but not stimulating because you won't be doing anything exciting or new. Since this is a desktop app, you will be expected to patch some of your development back to earlier versions. Documentation is almost non-existent/outdated, and a lot of your time will be spent doing "build," which is just setup to get started with your development. Until a few years ago, you were expected to have a virtual machine on your local machine for every version (!).

As a developer, you are expected to be everything from a project manager to a user experience designer. This is sold as a perk, but what you get are the worst aspects of all these roles, and you are still expected to perform your core job. Your technical skills will atrophy, and you will not enjoy coding anymore.

1. The culture Epic almost exclusively hires fresh graduates straight out of college. As you will soon discover, there is a reason behind this. They tend to throw all the new grads at their wall of problems and see who sticks. This causes a lot of imposter syndrome among the new hires. The people who do stick around tend to become jaded and lose motivation to innovate.

Management is only sourced from the internal employee pool. Google "failing upwards." A big percentage of bad software developers get promoted to managers, and they set extremely bad expectations. In addition, your career is 100% dependent on your team lead and the kind of projects you get early on. Your team lead doesn't like you? Tough luck.

There are almost no opportunities for career advancement if you want to become a good developer. The only way to get ahead is to put in a ton of extra grunt work over your peers and hope that your team lead is on your side.

1. The benefits One of the biggest benefits touted by Epic is "Sabbatical," which is a month-long trip sponsored by the company every five years. However, this is the biggest trap. It has so many rules surrounding it that it requires a huge internal wiki to explain it. The highlights: not guaranteed to be approved when you request it. It is based on multiple factors that are not told to you. Sixteen weeks' notice is required, and it takes four weeks to get approval. In order to justify sabbatical, they only offer two weeks of vacation in the first two years and then three weeks, while most tech companies offer three and four weeks, respectively.

Maternity/Paternity leave: Most people use FMLA (unpaid time off) to have a baby. The policies are that bad. Holidays: Six and a half days (yes, they proudly mention .5 days as well) per year. Sick days: Six per year. You will be reprimanded if you use all of yours on Friday or Monday. Not paid out if you quit (even though you earned them).

Stock purchase: One of the worst programs ever. Most tech companies have a base stock purchase program that lets employees buy stock at a 15% discount, and it vests over three months. Epic doesn't have anything fixed like that. You are offered a random discount based on your tenure and performance. They vest over a long time period (~18 months), and it will also increase your non-compete (which they obviously don't advertise). You can't really have a long-term investing strategy either, since it is a private company, and the "stock" prices are only disclosed once a year.

401K match: Fifty percent of the first 6% you contribute. Not too bad until you read the fine print – doesn't vest fully until five years, and the match only posts once a year.

Single offices for everyone: Another trap. You get to pick a single interior office with no windows, or share an office with someone. With COVID, the office sizes are being halved (and they obviously won't go back to full size). They look like broom closets now. You can't open the door if you are sitting at your desk.

WFH - You are never allowed to work from home, although you can get everything done remotely (they say you can WFH after work hours!). This is never going to change because they spent so much money on building a campus. Work hours are fixed, and there is no flexibility.

Campus - Talking of campus, they are located in Madison, where temperatures routinely touch 10F. There is not enough parking, so you can expect to park outside once in a while. When we raised this concern to management, the response was, "Come early, and you will find parking."

1. What happened recently? You might see a ton of negative reviews recently (starting Apr 2020). Epic's response to COVID was absolutely pathetic and destroyed whatever respect they had among their employees. Over the next few months/years, a lot of senior devs will be leaving the company, and this will cause utter chaos.

2. If it is so bad, why did you stay for so long? As mentioned above, Epic is extremely good at stacking their policies to ensure that you stick around. For a fresh college graduate like me, it seemed like a great place to work. If you want to just coast on life and buy a small house in Madison, it's very easy to stay on. It took me five years to realize this. Learn from my failure.

Conclusion - Run, don't walk away.

Please rethink your approach if you want Epic to survive.