Epic Systems

• Well-paid job relative to the cost of living in the area (though Madison is not as cheap as I might have guessed).
• Co-workers are nice people.
• Food is good, and the campus is in a nice natural setting.

If I were to have written a review at any point before the pandemic and Epic's abysmal response, I would have given this company 4 stars, maybe 3 stars on a bad day. I can't really forgive how appalling their response to COVID-19 has been.

Virtually all job titles at Epic can be just as effectively completed at home, yet they were later than most other major companies in allowing work from home, while at the same time a subset of employees (not software developers) were still travelling back and forth from our healthcare customers in some early hotspots (NY, NJ, WA).

Since allowing work from home in late March, upper management has sent out several passive-aggressive emails "welcoming" us to work back on campus while killing any posts on our internal forums questioning or asking for more clarity on their policies.

As of writing this (6/21), we're planning a phased return to work of all employees, with:

• No plan of mandatory mask usage.
• No mitigation for the large number of employees with an office mate where 6 ft social distancing is impossible.
• Those who rely on public transportation were told to find a carpool.
• Least serious but what I find incredibly cheap and petty: masks and hand sanitizer for sale in the stores rather than made freely available to all employees.

The above might have been somewhat forgivable if our management had been able to present some argument that we've been unable to meet commitments to customers while working from home, but that clearly hasn't been the case. Every role has pitched in extra hours either with installs, technical support, development, or testing somehow related to the pandemic for our customers - any quality metric I've seen has stayed the same or improved. It all just seems to be a vaguely defined notion of going against our "culture", "philosophy", or "DNA" (as if a 40-year-old company is a civilization, lol).

Speaking of which, our latest "corporate philosophy" course is going ahead with hundreds of new summer hires expected to go ahead without a virtual option.

You're supposedly an innovative, conscientious healthcare company in the midst of a pandemic. As Buffett said and as you love to point out at monthly meetings, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it." Don't torch your reputation for some vaguely defined notion of "culture".