Epic Systems

You will likely have the opportunity to work on impactful, meaningful projects that often have a measurable amount of good.

Great WLB, although this may vary by team, depending on whether you have an incompetent manager who values hours over results or a good one that only cares about outcomes.

There's a pretty open culture of communication and collaboration.

It's a great stepping stone to a better company. I saw a few reviews that indicated experience at Epic isn't transferable, which is laughably false. If you only do the bare minimum or don't work to understand/design architecture, sure, working here probably won't help you land a better job. BUT, this is more an indicator that you can succeed at Epic while being barely technically competent. No decent firm cares too much about specific tech; it's the higher-level design/architecture and algorithmic skills that matter, and you have plenty of opportunities to get those at Epic if you look for them.

Some internal tooling around DB functionality is great and probably could be a viable product offering by itself.

Epic did a lot of good for its customers during the pandemic. The website should give you an idea (waiving license fees, helping with planning/installing useful features, etc.).

The campus looks impressive, and it's an OK work environment if you have a window office. Food is good.

Competence of lower/middle management: on most teams, they are good to excellent, but on the teams where they are subpar, they are quite poor (see cons). I have been fortunate enough in my career to have had great managers; exposure to awful ones is secondhand! I had limited exposure to the higher management levels, but all interaction with them was positive. I'd like to explicitly call out the lead for internal tooling as exceptional.

Salary/raises are high, bonuses are OK, but stock/equity compensation is not close to competitive. This is both a reflection on the extremely high equity compensation at larger companies and the RSU equivalent at Epic being high risk for the employee.

OK benefits:

• Poor 401k match
• No mega backdoor Roth
• Bad PTO
• Good health insurance, but worse than top-tier tech companies (still better than the vast majority of companies)
• Sabbatical is nice but doesn't make up for poor PTO
• No donation matching, although employees can vote on how the somewhat stingy company charitable donations get allocated
• No employee time devoted to charity

The COVID response was/is very poor. Everyone is now back in the office (originally with no vaccine mandate, although there were masks mandated for unvaccinated staff, and now masks are mandatory and I think a vaccine mandate goes into effect in October) with a negative impact on team morale.

There was also an attempt to bring everyone back last year that ended at the last minute and got a bit of national news coverage for how bad of an idea it was.

There have been several disheartening communications to some employee groups with respect to what company values are. Search for "Epic Systems Diversity" for more context. Before that, I would have said Epic has poor diversity/inclusion, but it's comparable to the overall tech industry. However, after receiving that email, my trust in the company was severely eroded.

The CEO did do some amount of damage control, and the executive who sent out the email did send out a follow-up. But compared to larger software firms, diversity/inclusion feels like an afterthought.

Leading up to my departure, I felt that talented engineers were/are leaving at an extremely high rate. Compensation that, while high and far more than anybody needs to live very comfortably for the location, is lower than other software firms. Combined with the ease of interviewing now that everything is virtual, the forced return to office at Epic, and poor treatment of employees throughout the pandemic, it makes it difficult for me to see Epic retaining even above-average engineers at the company.

Several of my very skilled colleagues, responsible for some of the good stuff in the "pro" section, left with no job lined up. I personally regret having secured several job offers before resigning; a month is more than enough time to go from "hello" to "offer" at a top-tier firm in this market.

The campus is in the middle of nowhere, and commuting from Madison, a lovely little city where it's very pleasant to live, is unpleasant. One could live in Verona for a less unpleasant commute, but Verona is generic suburban sprawl/not appealing. Walls are also thin (you'll hear your neighbor's conversations, mildly disrupting, although easily mitigated with headphones), and many employees have depressing, windowless offices that are sometimes shared, even with the whole pandemic thing going on.

Some lower/middle management employees are not very good at managing product, pushing for meeting short-term deadlines/goals when that will likely lead to longer-term delays from having to urgently backport fixes to alpha-quality software.

For all management levels, I think there is an unfortunate pattern of rewarding those that blindly support whatever the next person higher up on the food chain is proposing or agreeing to any request, even if it's unreasonable or impossible. This really came to a head with the pandemic, where people dissenting against the forced return last summer moved into non-managerial roles. It might also contribute to the above-noted desire to get projects out the door, even when the project is clearly not ready.

You are "required" to log each 15-minute increment of time you were working throughout the day if you are unfortunate enough to have a manager that's not OK with you ignoring this. I never did this, but had colleagues whose managers expected it. This also seemed correlated with managers that used hours worked as a primary metric/were bad managers.

On most teams, there is essentially zero automated testing, with reliance on manual QA. On most teams, there is also a severe shortage of QA staff. This results in a large bottleneck.

Internal deployments are broken with some regularity due to under or untested changes moving in.

As a company, many internal frontend frameworks are actively hostile to testing and (internal) users. Lots of this is necessary complexity; some of this is just poor tooling, largely stemming from teams being understaffed.

Internal processes and tooling around "client" development are extremely poor and probably cost the company millions of dollars per year in wasted employee time on the low end.

"The sting of change is better than the pain of obsolescence" - Epic's CEO (may not be exact quote, but gets the idea across).

Refusing to accept the changing expectations of knowledge workers, brought about by the pandemic, will make it difficult to retain or hire skilled staff.

Actually give the internal tools team resources. EMC2/Release (and their excellent leads) do a great job with the shoestring resources they are given. Tooling is still horrible and it wastes hours of time per week per employee, on a good week.

Staff QA less inadequately.

Stop forcing people to come to campus during a pandemic.