Epic Systems

Very competitive salary, very nice food and drinks, comfortable office and easy parking, lots of conferences, presentations, and guest lectures. Some members of my team were intelligent and helpful, others sabotaged my work to make themselves look better.

Obsolete technology is a problem when you interview afterwards. Very heavy workload. The technical assignments are not very challenging but are difficult and time-consuming because:

• The software is very old and monolithic.
• Epic uses the most complex software development cycle I have ever seen. (Going through PQA is truly a good exercise, but I spent too much time chasing pedantic issues that just ended up getting dropped.)

We were constantly told that Epic is the only software company that has a casual environment and dress code. I felt that almost everyone knew this was a lie, and they should not have emphasized it as much as they do. We were also constantly told that the technology was not obsolete and the database is very fast. But again, the facts simply do not support this. The database performance studies we were quoted were very biased and not conclusive at all.

I might be the only one to say this next point: I felt the training was way too much, considering that I used only a small part of it on the actual job. I resented all the personal time I spent studying for Epic exams while my colleagues were learning modern, more efficient technologies. I probably would have failed out of Epic except I saw people cheating on the exams. After that, even my TL mentioned how much my grades improved.

The exams were the main reason I left. Now I have a better job doing EMRs where the training is much better with more reasonable testing procedures. And the weird thing is that I work fewer hours, but I deliver more and better solutions than I ever did with Epic.