Epic Systems

The campus is breathtaking. The cafeteria is amazing and ridiculously inexpensive for such awesome food. Great benefits, especially health insurance, which covers you from your first day of employment – none of this "90 days" crap. There are some AMAZING benefits that I've never seen anywhere, like a paid sabbatical (under certain conditions, they will even pay for your travel and lodging for things like charitable work or visiting a country you've never been to), as well as a matching 401k and generous stock options.

The problem is, you have to stick around for at least FIVE years for any of this stuff to kick in, which is exceedingly difficult for all but a few employees.

There are only a few levels of management between you and the top, which they tout as a good thing. Really, all it means is that if you haven't been there for a decade, there's zero chance of you getting promoted beyond anything more than team lead (which is one of those "more work for no more pay and no better title" sort of positions).

They have absolutely no concern for your quality of life, just how much of your personal time you're willing to devote to the company with little in return. The general expectation is that you work a minimum of 60 hours a week, traveling frequently (even if you're in a non-travel position, such as a programmer) and not even get compensated for weekend travel days.

And God help you if you have a complaint or conflict with management. I went to HR to request a transfer to a different division due to a severe personality conflict with my new manager (after my old manager got sick of things and left the company).

There are literally dozens of interchangeable divisions in the company to which you are just randomly assigned when you're hired. Yet, rather than deal with my request with discretion, like I requested, they went straight to the manager and told him everything about my complaint. Ultimately, this led to him putting me on "probation," despite the fact that I did not have any previous disciplinary action or performance issues.

Realizing there would never be a resolution that benefited me, I chose a severance package in lieu of probation and left, and it was one of the best decisions of my life.

Get out of your ivory tower. The division between the "10-year" employees/upper management and the sweatshop peons is HUGE, no matter how hard you try to prove it isn't. You're a massively growing company and you need to adapt to that; you can't continue running things like you did when there were 300 employees. No amount of popcorn at staff meetings or lobster at picnics will change the fact that Judy will completely ignore your email if you're a "lower employee", even if they're emails she specifically requested people send her.