Pros
- Pay is good, especially if your manager likes you it could go very high. - If you are good at explaining what you're doing to your manager and don't try to overachieve you can have a life working at Epic - Food is actually good and cheap - You have some freedom in the work you do, but it's very dependent on your manager. - Most people are nice and friendly and will help you if you ask. - Helping healthcare is sometime nice.
Cons
- Management only looks at some metrics, which uses to push people to do more, often causing problems. - VB6 is probably one of the worst language you can work on at this scale. Epic is way to big to be using a language which was intended for quick projects. - Some very special people are entitled to work in C#, and this makes it even worse for you. - Code base is terrible, full of hacks, dead code, magical constants (both VB6 and C# are affected, sadly), despite the two round of code review mandatory for every check-in. - Senior people, who built the horrible things you work on in VB6, are now working in C#, making your future life hell. - This depends on your team, but you will often just maintain an old code base, fixing bugs and praying for a project. - No unit testing, integration testing or any automated testing for what it matters (for most teams at least). Which means that things breaks easily and often. - Very fragile toolchain. Even doing easy things such as backporting fixes to other versions takes hours and needs manual testing. - Depending on your team you get to work some nights or weekends (and you are almost forced to stay). - Supervisors will throw as much as work as they can, because their supervisor is asking them to do so. - None of the problems I encountered during my day job are even vaguely interesting on a CS standpoint. - Did I mention VB6 is horrible? - People leave left and right, making building a network inside the company very hard. - For the same reason a lot of projects lack owners. A lot of code is actually unmaintained. - Most of the upper management doesn't code, and has never written code inside the company. Most of the managers don't have a clue about the code base they're managing. - Promotions is based on how much you fit in Epic horrible culture, rather than merit.