Epic Systems

Pay is acceptable.

I try at work because I care about the work.

The company strongly believes in itself and it's going places... slowly.

New development is in C# / .NET, not VB.

You can get a different job after working here.

I enjoy working with my coworkers.

I have always had the freedom to take on interesting projects so long as those projects are also difficult.

Your coworkers will try.

Senior devs don't want to leave, don't want to be promoted so never reach incompetence, and they will never get laid off, so there's a pool of knowledge about the legacy code whose memory stretches back decades.

You can just go down the hall and ask these devs why something is like X, and half the time they remember who wrote it and why off the top of their heads.

The company has been continuously improving itself for years, and you will want for nothing - great food, free drinks, and cool things on campus to see are all readily available. There is no beer, but eh, close enough.

You'll work more than 40 hours a week, and 45 hours a week is ideal.

You'll never be paid as much as you would be paid at a FAANG (although you'll work a lot less, so...)

You can get promoted easily once, and it's physically possible to be promoted twice, but more jumps are not possible. Also, being promoted means more work but not more pay, so why bother?

Epic software developers will never be paid as much as FAANG developers because Epic's revenue per employee is so much lower. If you want to get the best developers, you need to pay developers more. That means you need to raise revenue per employee. In a company which spends an absurdly large proportion of its revenue on R&D already, that means increasing development productivity so you need fewer developers per customer. The best way to do that is to improve our internal tools and invest in process automation. Facebook does this obsessively and can pay their developers twice as much on average because of it.