Epic Systems

Great job right out of college. The pay and benefits are great. It's a fun and creative work environment with some of the smartest co-workers around.

To someone who has never had another job after college, the long hours, high stress, and little support start to seem normal. Epic will admit that they aren't in the business of growing their employees, so if you make one mistake, you'll quickly find yourself on their bad side and out the door soon after that.

Middle management is a joke. Your boss is usually someone who was promoted because he or she was best at following orders, and his or her only training in management was a couple of books from their reading list. For that reason, it's luck of the draw whether you will succeed there, since this is the person in charge of determining your worth as an employee. To make matters worse, Epic says that it will invest in your training, but that investment turns out to be the bare minimum necessary, which is not nearly enough when you are tossed into the deep end of your projects.

From a developer's standpoint, the company is kind of a mess. The primary languages you'll be using are VB6 and Cache, both of which stopped being marketable ten years ago. If you're lucky, like I was, you'll get to work in the new C# framework, which is nice, but because it's so new, even the basic parts of it are bug-ridden, and help can be hard to find. Finally, "software must work" is one of the cornerstones of development philosophy at Epic, but it so often doesn't. The complexity in possible configurations of the software, combined with the lack of time and real clinical workflow experience on the part of the QA team, means that bugs are often uncaught until some customer finds them, which piles more work on your plate.

Your biggest mistake at Epic would be to take the job without having a plan of escape.

Invest more in employees. When someone works long hours to try to keep pace with the workload, consider that a reason for more training instead of a failing worker.

Consider that a flat corporate structure just doesn't scale to a company this size. It's time to have middle management that is actually trained to manage people.

So much of the information passed to employees seems aimed at those who have direct involvement with customers. Devs are the backbone of the company, and if you invested more in them, then you might actually get software that works. Period.