Epic Systems

Great benefit package, insurance is cheap and covers everything. Good pay, especially for fresh grads. Really nice campus with unique design. Subsidized food (very cheap and healthy).

• Working here basically means no future. The company uses Cache and VB, which have absolutely no marketing value and offer no career advancement. Therefore, it's really hard to find a different job after working here for a while. You might have to put in extra effort by working during the day and keeping your other skills (Java, C/C++, etc.) updated during the night... oh wait, you might have to work during the night too.

• Very few Team Leads have good management or people skills, which is the drawback of having a flat structure. You advance through seniority, not necessarily skills, so they actually contributed a lot to scaring talent away. If you're lucky, your TLs would be nice, and that probably happens 10% of the time.

• Really old/ancient code with inconsistencies all over the place. They're like a plague, and the worst thing is, most people who wrote those codes quit already. Now you're stuck debugging or fixing it. Also, production code contains a lot of bad practices (hardcoding, memory leaks, poor documentation...). Cache is so old that comments still affect performance (causing NoOp code), so good luck finding documentation when debugging it.

• The company has no clear vision for the future. Projects to satisfy customers move forward quickly, while projects to move to .NET got suspended for 3 years straight. New features are written in old code, which increases the codebase every day and makes transitions impossible.

• The CEO regularly badmouths competitors and uses twisted statistics to convince employees they're working for the best company in the world. She also keeps comparing Epic (merely $600M in revenue) to Google, Microsoft, and Facebook... Epic is far from it.

• If you piss off a customer, even a nurse, you're done. But go-lives are required, so good luck.

• The training environment is messed up, badly. Testing here is also done very poorly; that's why the company needs like 6 months to stabilize a version, and they promise to deliver a new version every year.

• Train and pick your Team Leads, seriously.
• Allow feedback about management levels.
• Sketch the future; world domination is not a valid one.
• Don't use twisted statistics.