Epic Systems

1. food
2. money

I am not a fan of the campus, honestly. It may look fancy, but it's not a park. When you work, you surely do think about those dragons and spaceships. But it is fancy.

There are many nice people.

Madison is pretty cold and boring, but that's minor.

The problem with the work is massive, at least for many apps in clinical. I can't say for all apps, but for my apps (a clinical app):

• The disorganized codebase makes it very difficult to work with, thus not helping your coding skills. You are forced to fix the code, and eventually, you are part of it.
• Outdated technology makes your skills useless.
• The horrible testing process makes the quality a joke.
• Constant escalations mean that projects are cut almost routinely. The mental stress is tremendous; you have to take that into mind.
• Continuous bug fixing. You may spend 5 hours finding out who owns the bug, another 4 hours arguing who owns it, another 4 hours reproducing it, 1 hour writing 10 lines of code, and 3 hours in functional testing (no unit testing most of the time, especially in VB).
• When you go to visit customers, constant complaints make you doubt what you do. But you will forget about it because they reimburse you for your fancy dinner.
• All your friends and colleagues are gone; you can't stand it anymore.
• Workload varies from team to team and from time to time. At times, you may work 60-70 hours a week; other times, you may be bored watching every YouTube video you missed. It's a mix. To be fair, this is not an issue at least for my app.
• The DoD deal is doomed, sales are slowing down, and hiring is freezing. People don't care anymore.

Make employees a priority. They are people, not money-making machines. If you don't care, people leave. If you think new fresh grads are gullible, that's true. But in the end, all they care about is how to get out there and write disgraceful code.