Epic Systems

Nice campus, cheap and good food, a "use your best judgment" attitude. For example, they ask you to use your judgment when spending on Epic paid dinners instead of setting a limit.

It is a great place to work if you have a good TL. Coworkers are generally intelligent and enthusiastic, except for a few QAers who can be pretty dumb and irritating. There is constant feedback, which might be bad since feedback can come from anyone and goes to your TL directly.

Good work is appreciated, mostly. If you know how to say NO politely, you will be fine. If you can learn to take short breaks at work to enjoy the weather and the campus, and leave your work at 5-ish and not bother about it at home, it will be a great place to work.

Though the pay is excellent when you join, the raise is slow. The yearly bonus is meager and is performance-based, solely depending on your TL and his TL. So, what it means is that to get a good yearly raise and bonus, you will have to work your ass off, at least if others in your team are doing so. There is no transparency in performance review. No one knows what you are rated on unless you are sneaky enough to find the review template in the shared folders. And you will be evaluated every second. They also fire a lot, so it's not a peaceful job for everyone.

The expectations are high. There is no proper process for design, and the deadlines are hard to reach. There are like a half-dozen deadlines every month and 2 to 3 days of bug bash nights prior to these deadlines. You work till 9 or 10, and you get a stinky meal for that, while you should be enjoying your favorite show on TV or time with your wife and kids.

If you can't say NO politely, you will end up buried in the huge pile of work that never seems to shrink or stop. If you can say NO and crack a joke, then you will be fine.

You will always find your epic friends complain about work and their TLs.

Lot of stupid policies, and HR never replies to your emails. You have a HR assigned to you when recruiting, but you never meet him/her after you join until you are quitting or fired.

Most of the development policies of the company are misunderstood by the higher-level developers/TLs, and they follow them blindly. Sometimes they are not open to new ideas because of this. They promise fixes and enhancements to customers and then push the lower-level developers to work overtime to get things done without any incentive. They keep pushing you saying, "But we promised the customers; it is high priority, and you should get it done," as if customers are going to kill you if you miss your deadline. Though they end up taking some years to solve certain customer problems.

Work is unpredictable, and there is no set development cycle. It changes every year, so you can't make any travel plans way ahead (I mean, you can travel during peak times if you notify early enough, but when you come back from travel, god knows how much more you have to work).

A lot of developers do not get time to enjoy the campus, though you are drawn to the company by it when you join. A lot of people eat at their desks, not just to go home early but to work during that time. All the team members are independent individuals who cannot adjust their schedules to eat together. And of course, the meetings at 12 so you can enjoy your lunch with a whole bunch of people talking about work.

A lot of bug fixes and sometimes bug enhancements are retrofitted back to older versions, which sucks from a developer standpoint because they are doing the same thing, writing the exact same code and documentation, and going through a long, tedious development process.

You are given ownership of modules, and if anything goes wrong with your module, you take the responsibility and fix it, which is good. But there is no one to get help from if you are not able to fix it.

I guess this page is not enough to write about the company.

Stop having so many deadlines and bug bash nights; that only leads to more and more bugs.

Stop updating old versions of software so much that developers feel sick. They have life too, so let them live it outside their office, at least after 8 hours of work each day.