Epic Systems

Good salary, willing to hire recent graduates, beautiful location and nice city, good cafeteria, rapidly growing company in a stable industry, decent benefits, and friendly co-workers.

My biggest complaint is that no one knows what they are doing. They have a training program, but it is not very targeted. There is a culture at Epic that "everyone does everything". For a 30-year-old software product with millions of lines of code, that is obviously impossible. There are developers there for years who don't know to develop for Clarity, a system for exporting the database to a SQL server, but are nevertheless expected to do so. This part of the culture needs to change; people should be allowed to specialize more.

Another big problem is that their handling of employees feels a bit dishonest. For example, we are told that we fill out our TLG (time log) for billing purposes only. Clearly, this is not true, since we are given hundreds of codes to use for non-billable activities. Rumor has it that TLGs are used as part of the decision-making process for raises and promotions, and this makes more sense.

As another example of apparent dishonesty, I was told at an interview that Epic uses lots of different languages in programming, including things like C#. While it is true that a few of Epic's products use cutting-edge languages, those products are pretty small. Nearly all developers will be working with only Visual Basic 6.0 and an unknown language called Cache'. There is zero demand for either of these languages, so job experience at Epic basically doesn't count. Trying to leave will be like trying to get hired as a college graduate. To be fair, at the time I left, there was talk of migrating the client-side software to a more modern language. But this migration will take years, so only work with Epic if you are willing to work with languages that are not in demand anywhere else.

Go-lives are nightmarish. With one single day of training, I was expected to be able to go on-site to a hospital and help doctors and nurses use their newly-installed software. I had no experience with the software I was helping them with and little help from other Epic employees on-site. Epic presents this to its developers as a required learning experience, but the doctors and nurses there do not believe you are there to learn; they believe you are there to help them. The real reason Epic sends under-trained developers on Inpatient go-lives, I believe, is that they do not have enough properly trained people to meet their contractual obligations.

You can't fix all the bugs in your software by adding more developers. You need to change the system itself. Your software cycle encourages people to put things off till the last minute, leading to a huge rush right before the deadline.

Learn to respect your employees. I never felt my work or opinions were valued, and my team lead never did my employee evaluations.

All the gimmicky themes for the rooms and buildings lose their novelty after the first week, so cut that out.