Epic Systems

Epic pays fairly well for a non-NYC/SF software firm, and the health insurance is the best you'll find anywhere. The fringe benefits (delicious lunch, great campus, etc.) are solid, too.

I think that, for the most part (and despite my complaints on other matters later in this review), Epic genuinely does good by its customers/clients in terms of helping them improve healthcare delivery.

Epic has systematically quashed all internal avenues for giving meaningful feedback regarding policies that affect the conditions of employment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Epic has then gone on to make decisions about work-from-home that are seemingly to the benefit of nobody, with the possible exception of a small cabal in uppermost management who are apparently allergic to the idea of people not physically being on campus.

At the most recent all-hands (staff) meeting, Epic then stood up a stooge to talk about how the pandemic isn't really that bad and working from the office is totally going to be hunky-dory.

This will inevitably prove injurious to the health of Epic's employees and the larger community in which we all live.

The marginal benefit of forcing everybody to return to the office (currently planned for September, with no signs that this is going to change) cannot possibly be worth the marginal health risks incurred (to say nothing of the discontent being fomented among unhappy employees).

I could levy various complaints about our tech stack (long story short, it is a nightmare, albeit less so now than when I started), but these frankly pale compared to the utter horror show that has been the company's mismanagement in the face of the pandemic.

Letting people work from home during a pandemic is a one-sided tradeoff. The company loses almost nothing ("culture" hardly counts) and gains quite a bit in the way of employee goodwill/morale and public health. And yet, bafflingly, Epic is positioning itself on the other side of this tradeoff. My advice: get on the correct side of the tradeoff.