Epic Systems

• Campus is nice.

• Food is decent but has become much more expensive since the pandemic. The price per entree is much higher than before, and portion sizes are minuscule.

• Ironclad job security. The company is short-staffed, and the barrier of entry to healthcare IT is extremely high, which means that Epic has not had to deal with many meaningful competitive threats for most of its existence and will likely continue to dominate the market in the near future. As long as you meet expectations, you will pretty much never be at risk of being let go.

• Compensation and benefits are very good for someone fresh out of college.

• The company will train you in everything you need to know, and you will be given meaningful work and responsibilities quickly, which will help you build up a lot of skills very quickly. You also get access to a lot of leadership and mentorship opportunities early on.

The quality of your work life will be mostly dictated by the team and application you are placed on, as well as your role. Your team placement is solely at Epic's discretion. I was lucky and got placed on a team that had a lot of smart, capable people who I found easy to work with and allowed me to maintain good work-life balance, but if you read the other reviews here, you'll see that this isn't the case a lot of the time.

Very little remote work flexibility. Employees are required to work in office basically at all times and must live within a 45-minute radius of the campus, which is in the vicinity of Madison, WI. People in the SD role should take particular note of this because all of the other product roles have the option to go remote with Boost after a few years, but this usually isn't available to developers because we don't do customer-facing work. Also, the fact that the company campus is well outside of the city leaves you with a difficult choice: live in the actual city and deal with long commute times, or live near work but miss out on the interesting parts of Madison.

Very sub-par PTO by tech industry standards. Employees get 10 days of PTO to start, which increases to 15 at 2 years and then never increases again. I noticed an interesting pattern during my time at Epic where most of the departures from my team were people who were from places that were very far away from Madison, and I think this had something to do with it. With only 10/15 days of PTO and no remote work flexibility, it becomes very difficult to visit friends and family that are far away.

Upper management is out of touch and refuses to acknowledge any feedback that they don't like.

The tech stack is ancient and drowning in technical debt. Additionally, all of the development tools and frameworks tend to be very unstable and difficult to work with because it's all built in-house and supported by understaffed teams within the company. Add on all of the risk management and complex processes that come with working in the healthcare space, and you end up with extremely long and difficult development timelines for even the simplest features.

Listen to employee feedback and give more incentives for people to stick around long-term. A lot of the problems with Epic's software and customer support can be traced back to retention issues.

As an example, you could give people gradually increasing amounts of remote work days/privileges as their tenure increases.