Epic Systems

Cheap cafeteria with good selection.

Good salary out of school.

Highly respected company.

Developers treated well and with respect.

Was flexible during the pandemic.

Offers extensive training.

Generally trusts employees; no micromanagement.

Comfortable work-life balance (for me, typically 40 hours/week).

Location (Madison) is relatively low-cost to live (compared to California, NYC).

Your work helps people.

People are generally helpful if you have questions or need help.

The staff at Epic are, in general, more diverse than the city of Madison or the university I went to.

Lots of legacy code.

Easy to get sucked into working (happens to many, including me for the first 2 years).

Little to no creative freedom. You'll be working on bug fixes or projects that have been committed to customers. If you have an idea for something new, there are some avenues to experiment for a short time, but usually you will not get to work on this unless you spend your own time on it.

If you are helpful to other people or are a functional area expert, then you will spend a lot of time answering questions. This can take away from your own development time.

There is a lot of variation in teams, especially with regard to meetings.

There is a lot of code; sometimes it can be hard to tell if what you're making has already been made.

It can be hard to find which APIs to use at times. Sometimes documentation is thin, so you may often find yourselves having to ask others (which can be slow).

There is only Software Developer and Software Developer Team Lead. There isn't really a concept of Senior Developer or a promotion to be one. Although, for the purpose of mentorship, it's relatively easy to tell who the functional area (domain) or technical experts are.