Pros
Cafeteria has fantastic food Fantastic insurance (if your family has a history of mental illness you WILL need this) Acceptable benefits package Given opportunities to develop career skills that will be valuable at other companies Exposed to some genuinely good job experience that you can carry over to other jobs Good first-job pay Can work with some truly brilliant people You could potentially have a really excellent boss
Cons
The negative reviews are correct; you are not being misled by bitter people wanting to spite Epic. They're trying to warn you. Turnover rate is over 10% per year. They brag about being below the average for "service industry", a demographic which includes restaurant/fastfood workers (very high turnover). 0.5 sick-days per month, including time spent for doctor's visits or therapy. You will be asked to stay late the day-of, forcing you into cancelling date plans or other social occasions with only a few hours' notice. More stressful than your most difficult college years. No work life balance; it's work-work balance. No paid maternity leave, no paid paternity leave. If you are sexually harassed by a developer, as a Quality Assurance person you are more replaceable than them and they will not be harshly disciplined. This stress will make any physical/mental genetic vulnerabilities present themselves from your previously pristine youthful personage. If you're not a college grad, they will not hire you. They hire college grads on the assumption that their lack of work experience means they will not know their workers' rights. Epic has been subject to multiple class action lawsuits for unpaid overtime for unskilled labor (Quality Assurance has settled once before, and are suing again now). Lower/Middle Management is college students who don't know any better, half the time. The upper management is people who haven't touched the actual Epic system in years so they've lost touch with the specifics of how hard a project concept will be to implement. Workplace dynamic mirrors that of high-school cliques; you better be part of the In-Crowd. The more popular kids will get the flashy projects, the unpopular ones will get thankless drudge-work. For Implementation Specialists (IS) at least (if not the other roles) they are told to fire the bottom 50% of employees every year, based on performance. Deadlines will be set arbitrarily by the Sales Team and as Quality Assurance you're the last step in the process, so any delays ahead of you will force you between a rock and a hard place of compromising testing quality for meeting the deadline. You will be blamed for if you miss a bug because of this time-crunch. You will be pressured into rubber-stamping something as "tested" even if you do not believe you had enough time to test. A project that took 5 months was initially planned to take 1 month. "Crunch period" is meaningless at Epic; every day is crunch time. At worst, your boss will be not more than a task-master, measuring quotas for how many bugs you've found. You will not get leadership from them on how to improve; you will only get pressure that you must improve.