Epic Systems

• Decent chance to travel to interesting places, even as a software developer.
• Solid compensation package for new graduates, including high salaries and excellent healthcare.

In my experience, it's a very high-stakes environment with a lot of pressure. If you are working on a piece of software that deals with patient safety, there is very little margin for error and lots of pressure to get things right. That can be a lot to deal with if this is your first job.

A troubling culture of overwork. My manager regularly worked 60-70 hours a week and regularly encouraged my team members to do the same.

Not a ton of team atmosphere. Everyone had their own office (or shared with a partner), so there weren't a lot of opportunities to work together or build a team atmosphere with your functional team.

Team leads often had too many reports to be able to devote enough time to individual reports. I frequently saw 1:1s get cancelled because TLs were too busy.

Going on observation trips. As a recent hire, you have to spend 10 days a year hanging out in a place where they use Epic software, observing its use. So, you might be hanging around an urgent care center with a clipboard, sitting in on patient visits and such. These can be awkward, horrible experiences, especially if you are an introverted software developer. The providers on the trip might despise Epic and resent you even being there, and it's very uncomfortable asking patients if you can sit in and watch their doctor's appointment.

It's just generally a bummer to work for a company where the general consensus of the people using the software is that it sucks. Go to a doctor's office where they use Epic and ask, "What do you think of Epic?" There's a great chance they'll tell you it sucks.

Many software developers have to engage with customers far more often than you would expect. I was typically pulled into 1-3 customer calls per week, and sometimes these go terribly when the customer is upset about some update or something.

They keep the career advancement scheme purposefully nebulous. There's no well-defined promotion plan; you just sort of gain influence in certain areas. That's fine if that's the way you excel, but if you're looking for a well-defined career path, it doesn't really exist here.

There's a bit of worship culture around the founder and CEO.

They try to abstract away as much of the "real" development process as possible. They use custom internal programs to manage development workflows and abstract away the concept of branches, merging, and deployment. It makes it feel like a software factory, where you're not developing; you're just punching in code blocks to this conveyor belt system that delivers software updates. You won't come away from working here with any transferable technical skills, either, since all the systems are so bespoke.

First off, don't have anyone regularly working more than 40 hours a week. That is why you have a reputation as a place that takes in new college graduates, chews them up, and spits them out in 1-2 years.