Epic Systems

1. Good food: The chefs at Epic are great, and this is motivation to go to work for lots of people.

2. Beautiful campus: The campus is huge and extremely pretty.

3. Company culture is good. Hearing the CEO every month in the staff meeting is very motivating and inspirational.

1. Diversity in managers is unbelievable. Some managers are descendants of Hitler. This has not happened with me, but I have seen extremely rude behavior from few managers and product leads in meetings. On the other hand, I have seen managers who are too chilled out and have absolutely no opinion, which means other managers in the same team rank their team members to their liking.

2. Rankings are more comparative to your peers. There is a set number of people who can be at a certain rank, which means if there are lots of people of the same caliber on the same team, some of them will end up bumped down in ranks. Ranks determine raises and bonuses. This also means that if your team has few people who work 60+ hours per week and have absolutely no life, then you are doomed because you will be compared to those people, and your TL will often give their examples even if they are not better and are only getting done more just because of the hours.

3. Lots of people get the opportunity to become managers early, and the unfortunate thing about that is young, out-of-college graduates don't often know how to deal with experienced team members.

4. Your TL really plays a big role in your career here at Epic. Epic is all about doing the right thing, and if ever while doing so you cross paths with some hot-headed TL, and your TL isn't strong enough to back you, then it will be you who will suffer entirely.

5. There is a peer feedback system where you can submit feedback to someone's TL. I have mostly submitted positive feedback because that is something you hear less here at Epic, but twice when I submitted mediocre feedback, it backfired. TLs are supposed to take that feedback, verify it, and tell it to their team members anonymously, but both the peers for whom I submitted mediocre feedback just submitted poor feedback for some random reasons for me in the next six months because their TLs were not discreet enough. Yeah, so there are lot of immature people who are trying to take revenge instead of improving on it.

6. Epic has new quarterly releases, and many teams think that they have adapted to it, but they really have not. Developers are the ones who end up suffering the most. Project planning starts way too late, and QA are given an extremely generous amount of time to test, leaving minimal time for design, dev, and code review. Development is the core of Epic, but quarterly releases have turned it the other way now. Due to extremely tight timelines, the quality of dev is not as good, and more issues are found during code review and quality assurance, which ends up adding more overhead and time.

7. The web transition has taken a toll on devs, and more devs just end up working on web transition and making things prettier instead of innovative things. I definitely remember the good old days where I used to work on innovative projects back to back.

8. Learning has actually been at an all-time low. When I started, there were so many sessions available and time to actually attend them. Now, learning is very trimmed down (shark weeks have turned into shark days to shark half-days), and most of the time, attending them means I am staying late to finish my work.

9. Stock options are awful. I have to pay out of my pocket to obtain the bonus percentage shares. People coming out of college are just paying loans. People done with college loans are getting houses and paying loans for that, and you want them to take another loan to buy shares to get the bonus percentage?

Because of all these cons, I would not recommend any of my friends to apply here anymore.

Overall company culture is great; please don't let it wash away with increasing size.

1. People leave their managers, not the company. Epic doesn't have a bad turnover rate, but please take feedback from good devs who leave seriously. Also, probe them a little to provide feedback. Most people are afraid that feedback will not be anonymous and they don't want to burn bridges.

2. Teach managers to respect team members. If people are marking themselves as not happy in reviews, do something before they make up their minds to leave.

3. Implement a truly anonymous feedback system where members can submit feedback for management or someone they think will just backfire on them.

4. Setting unrealistic project expectations is not planning, and anyone can really do that. A true manager will plan things in such a way that they will get things done without unnecessarily burning their resources out.

5. Mandate one medium-size project per year for managers, from design to release, to be started and finished in the same quarter. This way, they are aware of what it takes to get a project done for a developer and have somewhat realistic expectations.