Epic Systems

• Pay is good.
• Madison is cheap.
• Great campus.
• Health care industry.
• Smart co-workers, with epic hires from the best universities.

• Poor work-life balance. Expect to work a minimum of 50 hours per week.

• The technology used is outdated. The client-side is VB and the server-side is Chronicles.

• You will have to code in M language. No one I know uses this language anymore, so you won't be able to market this skill. This is not even Cache. Cache has so many features, and Epic doesn't use any of them.

• Epic has been saying that they will be migrating to .NET for a while now. Not all the code will be migrated to .NET; only some apps.

• Epic sends its employees on-site, and that time is not counted. You are still expected to finish your work even when you are traveling.

• In Epic, you don't know what your TL is thinking about you; everything is so secret. You don't get enough feedback from your TL.

• Some of the TLs lack people skills. They just want to get work done. They don't know how to respect their team members. I have seen some good people leave just because they hated their TLs.

• Lack of communication between team members at a personal level. Everyone sits in their own rooms, and the only interaction they have among themselves is when you have a question related to work or during meetings.

• Everything you do as a developer is measured. Lot of micromanagement.

• Some get promoted to TL soon, within 2 years. I don't know the criteria. TL decides your career/future. If you don't become a TL within 2 years, forget about becoming a TL.

Train your TLs in people skills. Don't just promote anyone who logs more hours to TL position.

Without proper management skills, they will just ruin the team.

Try to retain employees.