Epic Systems

Very competitive salary; other benefits are average.

Most coworkers are very bright, friendly, and helpful.

Health care IT has the potential to be very interesting and rewarding.

It's not the evil empire. For all its faults, Epic does have a lot of good things to offer.

Experience largely depends on your manager and his/her manager. Some teams have reasonable expectations for workload, while others do not. It's easy to find yourself overwhelmed. Epic's response is typically to blame poor time management on your part.

Software is fragile and poorly designed. This is partly because of the programming languages (a lot of MUMPS and VB6). It's also partly because Epic's developers, while generally very bright, aren't very experienced (and often don't even have a background in software development). So you end up with this immense codebase filled with "newbie" mistakes: poor design decisions, no documentation, and subtle but dangerous bugs. It's very difficult to be productive and innovative when this is what you have to work with. Don't expect to grow as a software developer at Epic.

Our end users don't really like our software and resent having to use it. Epic only pays lip service to addressing any of these concerns.

Company culture is weird, with a lot of corporate naivete and arrogance. They generally treat employees like children; you'll feel like you're back in middle school.

Evaluate your processes and expectations of your employees with a focus on increasing productivity.

Focus on reducing stress and burnout, which will help your well-known employee retention issues.