Epic Systems

I worked as an intern at Epic. The food is absolutely delicious, the campus is absolutely gorgeous (with cool themes!), and the pay is (probably) higher than what you will find at any other company in the Midwest.

Teams seem to be well-sized. In my limited experience, management worked hard to make the place lighthearted. The work environment is incredibly relaxed.

No hours are counted; even interns are salaried. There is no dress code whatsoever, and everyone either shares an actual office (with real walls) with one coworker, or has a private office.

We got together quite often for awesome team-building events. Also, the sound of Nerf guns never seemed to be far away...

Intern development projects are usually R&D type stuff, but are always actual programming projects. This may sound like a silly comment, but I assure you that it isn't.

Epic didn't seem to be heavy on strict design process, unless it actually helps. Interns (we worked in small groups) were given free rein of all design (structural and visual) and implementation details, with the exception of any necessary requirements gathering, which was done for us. That means pride of true ownership, which is rare for an undergraduate.

Everyone around you is very competent, bright, and full of criticism (the good kind). There's a certain peace of mind that comes with never having to look over others' shoulders.

The employees have such diverse talents and interests that it starts to feel like a university campus, with a plethora of clubs and "extracurricular" groups to join.

Over 100 interns lived together in the Regent Apartments, on the edge of the UW campus, making it easy to form great relationships.

Great (and free) intern events were constantly planned, including:

• Hikes
• Baseball games
• Trips to the Dells

The intern team actually implements suggestions, so you know that they are working to make the experience even more attractive.

Interns come from all over the country (and out of it), and from differing levels of higher education. Diversity always makes for interesting conversations and relationships.

Some decisions don't seem to be made very quickly. The company is VERY cautious.

There is a constant, visible focus on avoiding bad PR, and some strange rules are born of that.

This cautiousness extends to software as well. They tend to ignore widely used, powerful external software in favor of in-house copies.

Because of the pressure to reinvent the wheel in-house and the large amount of code sitting around, it isn't uncommon for different teams to redevelop the same thing multiple times.

Then you have 4 in-house copies of something someone else has been doing better for years.

Put more pressure on everyone else around you to experiment with well-established open source libraries and external tools when relevant. You could cut down on redundancy and relieve developer workloads, which could improve Glassdoor reviews.