Epic Systems

Decent pay considering the location.

1. Ancient old tech and release workflow. It will be extremely difficult for you to find your next developer job. Although they brag about going to .NET, most work is still done in CACHE and VB6. No OOP design, no web service, no cloud. Even if you are lucky to work on .NET, you will be surprised to learn how difficult it is to debug such a huge monolith system. There is version control for VB6, but for CACHE scripts, everybody works on the same repo. If someone else locked a routine you are about to work on, you have to call the guy to unlock it.

After several years, you lose track of popular technology, either stick with Epic or invest time and money to learn (but you still lack industrial experience). A Microsoft dev manager once told me they don't think engineers from Epic make good candidates.

1. Poor management. Team leads lack knowledge of management and have no idea how to communicate. A great portion of leads are young developers because older people want to avoid being a lead.

2. No sense of belonging. You know you will leave the company after a few years for sure because most of your co-workers are young students, and older co-workers keep leaving. But considering point 1, it will be hard to find your next job.

3. Private holding, so you actually have no idea how the company does. Boss boasts sales on monthly staff meetings, while you see otherwise on media.

4. Go-live is absurd. You HAVE to go to hospitals all over the country to 'help' them use the software, while you have no idea how the software works. It is a huge system, and as a focused and busy developer, there is no way to know how. Sometimes you end up in clinics in dangerous neighborhoods with drunken doctors. If you like to travel, you may like it, but for me, it was not a good experience.

5. Does not treasure its employees. Years back, Epic built new offices and recruited developers crazily from India (500 new developers per month) to get prepared for the big contract from DOD. Then they lost the contract to Cerner. So Epic began to lay off developers with absurd reasons. I have a friend who got laid off because he didn't log his time every day. Another developer got laid off because the TL thought he could not communicate with the team, which makes no sense.