Epic Systems

1. Health care is an incredibly fascinating industry. It's complex and has a lot that's broken about it that needs to be fixed. There are real-life benefits to EMRs that can help improve lives.

2. Many people who work at Epic are smart and driven. Also, many are transplants who found themselves in Madison only due to Epic, so it makes it easier to meet people if you're one of those transplants.

3. There are great opportunities to move up and manage people. Since the company is huge and constantly growing, and turnover is fairly high, they need new people to step up into management roles all the time.

1. As a software developer, you will work either mostly or entirely with tools that are not widely used by other companies.

VB6 and Cache are not widely used (thankfully) by pretty much any other company out there, so if/when you want to change jobs, you will have to either study hard for tech interviews and/or have kept up with what's new in the developer community.

1. As a software development team lead (basically a middle manager), I spent a lot of time speaking with Epic's customers.

Unfortunately, most of this time was spent writing down the customers' mostly legitimate complaints and trying to placate them as much as possible, given we weren't going to solve most (if not all) of their issues any time in the near future (probably not even within the next year or two).

1. Software you develop will not be used by customers in production environments for 2-3 years. This is really unsatisfying.

2. There's no such thing as working too much at Epic. As a manager, most requests for more team members go unanswered.

3. If you're a software developer and have good management/people skills, you can find yourself writing no code very quickly. If you're like me and enjoy the mentorship and product input that management brings at Epic but still want to write code, you'll likely want to escape Epic before you're no longer able to program anymore.

4. The way in which they evaluate people is really messed up. There's a lot written about how Microsoft does it; Epic is very similar in a lot of ways.

Embrace the future, or you will have huge problems hiring developers. Migrate away from VB6 to ASP.NET as soon as possible. Spend more time addressing customer issues than finding ways to placate them while you basically ignore their concerns.