Epic Systems

I genuinely liked most of the people I worked with. The health insurance is good.

The workload and pressure will burn you out. Epic regularly overcommits on work to be done and severely underestimates how long that work will take. You will be pushed to complete development too quickly, but are then blamed for any consequences that result from rushed development.

Employees openly complain about how bad their mental health has gotten from being constantly overworked. People are coming and going so frequently that there are huge knowledge gaps, which just adds to the stress if you ever have to deal with them.

The company is always putting out fires rather than focusing on long-term initiatives. A majority of your time will be spent doing urgent bug fixes rather than any interesting project work. Even if you are lucky enough to be on a cool project, expect it to be pushed back multiple times. Management claims that new, exciting enhancements are on the horizon, but they've been saying this for years. The codebase also racks up significant technical debt because there is no time to rework crappy, old code or do a large-scale fix.

There is minimal growth opportunity since these project opportunities are so rare. I actually asked my TL about how I could reach a higher developer rank, and they said there wasn't a good way other than thinking up and doing a project on my personal time outside of work. There was no work planned for the next several years that could contribute towards a higher rank. Advancement here is really just having more and more things added to your plate, without any additional compensation.

The tech stack involves lots of homegrown tools, much of which are slow and clunky. You will learn very little in terms of transferable skills. The longer you stay at Epic, the harder it will be to find work anywhere else.

There is no flexibility to work from home and any time off is minimal. Vacation time caps at 3 weeks and sick leave is not even a full day per month. Parental leave is a measly 2 weeks at reduced pay and can only be used twice, at least 2 years apart. Most other companies offer 8 or more weeks at full pay. I think there are maybe 7 holidays as well. The sabbatical sounds nice, but given that this is only every 5 years, it doesn't make up for the lack of leave elsewhere. A company that offers 4 weeks of vacation and some basic holidays beats Epic in the long term.

The salary is nice for Madison, but isn't remarkable for the industry. The raises they give aren't that great and are given no context since they are determined in a black box. I received my biggest raise by going to another company.

Your employees are struggling, and you should help them.