7 years and counting - Software Developer Epic Employee Review

1. Diversity in managers is just unbelievable: some managers are decedents 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 same team rank their team members to their liking. 2. Rankings are more comparative to your peers. There is set number of people who can be at certain rank, which means if there are lots of people of 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+hrs/week and have absolutely no life than 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 hours. 3. Lots of people get opportunity to become mangers early and 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 big role in your career here at Epic. Epic is all about doing the right thing and if ever while doing so you crossed path of some hot head TL and your TL isn't strong enough to back you then it will be you who will suffer entirely. 5. There is 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 back fired. TLs are supposed to take that feedback verify it and tell it to their team members anonymously but both the peers who I submitted mediocre feedback for just submitted poor feedback for some random reasons for me in next 6 monyhs because their TLs were not discreet enough. Yeah, so 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 one who end up suffering the most. Project planning starts way too late and QA are given extremely generous amount of time to test leaving minimal time for design, dev and code review. Development is core of Epic but quarterly release has turned it the other way now. Due to extremely tight timelines quality of dev is not as good and more issues are found during code review and quality assurance which ends up adding up more overhead and time. 7. 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 good old days where I used to work on innovative projects back to back. 7. Learning actually has been 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 in shark day to shark half day) and most of the time attending them means I am staying late to finish my work. 8. Stock option is awful. I have to pay out of my pocket to obtain the bonus % shares. People coming out of college are just paying loans, people done with college loan are getting houses and paying loans for that and you want them to take another loan to buy shares to get the bonus %? Because of all these cons I would not recommend any of my friends to apply here anymore.