Epic Systems

Culinary is great. Not as good as it used to be, but for a corporate cafeteria, the variety for the price is awesome.

Smart coworkers who genuinely want to help you.

Lots of opportunity for ownership on projects and a lot of opportunity to move laterally into other areas or teams of Epic software.

Pay is great for developers, especially in the first few years and especially compared to cost of living.

Upper management is opaque, inflexible, and uncaring. Our inclement weather policy is that if the local schools close, you can work from home for the day. In December, they didn't, so people tried driving in; multiple accidents, people driving into ditches continuously, and an average commute of 2 hours. When questioned about updating the policy internally, they closed the discussion thread and said they'd make no changes. After the Dobbs supreme court decision, employees asked for additional resources for women employees needing to travel out of state for care, which Epic closed the thread about and emphasized they care about the patients, not us. Bad track record with diversity, equity, and inclusion, including proactively reaching out to DEI groups during the George Floyd protests to discourage involvement.

The COVID response was atrocious, enough to get us on the national news. See other reviews and the CBS news segment. The same attitudes remain today that caused it. The man they put in front of the interviewer was a sock puppet for upper management (none of us knew who he was) and has since left the company.

Understaffing by design. Most, if not all, teams are stretched and stressed.

Packed parking garages and a fairly high chance of sharing an office. Our rate of building new office buildings is woefully inadequate for our numbers, even with our understaffing.

Time-logging required down to 15-minute granularity even for time not billed to customers. This time is reviewed, available for team leaders to use to micromanage you, and factors into your bonuses.

Bad burnout and a pretty high turnover rate, which HR is all too quick to point out is in line with the healthcare software industry. Average tenure is very low.

The underlying database that's primarily used (Intersystems Cache) is a relic, and your experience with it will not be transferable anywhere else.

PTO is extremely underwhelming. You get two weeks paid vacation for your first 2 years, then three weeks a year beyond that. The sabbatical every five years is great until you hear about all the strings, like restrictions on when you can take it (if you're supporting multiple installing customers, good luck!). Statistically, you won't even make it to 5 years here to take it. 6 sick days a year. 5 work from home days a year. 7.5 holidays, with 1 day you can use on any other holiday Epic doesn't observe. The line for the number of holidays is, "This is how we've contracted with customers, per the days we've seen them take holidays for support staff," but when asked why this policy applies to people who don't support customers and excludes days all our customers have off, radio silence.

The non-compete can be anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 years, depending on if you've taken Epic stock and your start date. This precludes you from working with a binder-full of customers, competitors, and other software companies that ostensibly don't compete with Epic. For TS and IS, this is a pretty huge deal. For developers, just don't take a job here expecting to stay in healthcare software after you leave.

No sense in giving them any. They don't listen anyway.