Epic Systems

If you're young and just out of college, Epic is hard to beat. The median age is probably less than thirty, as most people here are either just graduated with a bachelor's or master's degree.

The campus is simply beautiful. Most employees have an office with a door, and many new employees even have their own offices. Those who are in satellite facilities and have cubicles will be moved to Verona as soon as the new campus buildings are completed.

They also work very hard at training new staff in existing software and development techniques. The system is huge, but the initial training helps bridge a lot of that gap.

If you work there five years, you get a paid, month-long sabbatical, and if you use it to travel abroad, Epic will help defray some of that cost. The sabbatical is in addition to two weeks paid vacation a year.

Finally, the benefits are very nice (90% of health, dental, and disability paid), and they start you off with a 50%/6% contribution to a ROTH 401k.

By the way, the salary is pretty nice, too.

If you're not young and just out of college, you might feel out of place among all these younger people. Finding colleagues your age might be a bit more difficult in this case.

They ask long hours of their project management staff. While that is to be expected to some degree, they can really pile on at times (we give a lot of support to our customers, and it requires more manpower than we are sometimes equipped to give).

If you're a developer, you have to work in VB6 and MUMPS. The latter especially could lead to career roadblocks later, not to mention being incredibly frustrating, since MUMPS is a typeless language, does not ignore whitespace, and has little to no error handling.

On a benefits note, the 401k contribution isn't fully vested for two years, which could be a little annoying.

Perhaps the most annoying is that since Judy absolutely refuses to open Epic's financials to the SEC, the number of equity stakeholders is capped at 500, since having more than that would require filing statements with the SEC.

If Epic grows to 10,000, having only 500 of them with an equity stake in the company is not going to be fair.

Filing statements with the SEC does not mean you have to go public. Please consider revising this policy if Epic keeps growing at its present rate.