Pros
- The salary and benefits are quite good for the majority of roles, especially since it's the first real job for many new hires (as it was for me). - I believe every salaried employee has an office, possibly shared with another person. There are no cubicles. - The campus' landscaping is nice. There's a little forest, a stream, plenty of interesting plants and flowers, a multi-purpose field, a lake, running trails, etc. And there are fun little touches scattered around campus, like a photorealistic painting of an orangutan on the wall of some outdoor stairs. None of this is necessary, but it is nice, and it helps keep Epic from seeming too cold and corporate. - Almost all employees are bright and helpful. I say almost, but I never actually worked with anyone really dickish. - The internal culture has a young, geeky bent. I remember seeing Arrested Development references in company-wide presentations and memes inserted into company-wide announcements. The newest building is Harry Potter themed, for god's sake. - Building on the previous point, if you're a recent grad coming to work here making friends is not hard, as there are literally thousands of people around your age. - Epic really does put a good product first. The culture of helping customers deliver the best care is repeatedly emphasized and not just a show when customers are around. - The food in the cafeterias (although I never ate at the newest one, which opened June 2015) is much, much better than it has to be. I would compare it to a restaurant with entrees in the $10-15 range, which is rather remarkable when you're paying $3-$5. The culinary staff manages to be both inventive and consistent, turning out competently-prepared stuff that isn't super inventive (e.g. roast chicken, green beans almondine, and mashed parsnips) and occasionally throwing down a few plates of avant-garde wizardry (once, I swear, there was a dish with lobster, shiitake mushrooms, whey, daikon, and dashi). They are great. It's the one thing about the place I really miss. - Madison is really not a bad city. It's usually described as the "Austin of Wisconsin", which isn't so far off-base. Some people complain that it's very white, which is only true if you stick around the capital area. Fitchburg (which is a few miles south of the capital), for example, is not very white.
Cons
- The work is dull. I spent all of my time fixing little bugs, which requires navigating Epic's complicated internal structure and writing everything in M, a really unpleasant language that no other company uses. This was the dealbreaker for me, because it meant every damn day was just 8 or 9 hours of uninteresting work. It actually takes quite a bit of work to understand the internal structure necessary to do dev work, and the kicker is it's mostly stuff that will never translate to any other job. Put bluntly, I looked around and saw nobody in the company doing work I wanted to do, so leaving (after a little less than a year) was an easy decision. This was far and away the biggest factor in my leaving. It's great to do challenging, interesting work for 50-60+ hours a week. Doing boring things day-in day-out for 40 hours a week is a nightmare. - The culture requires working hard. This would be fine if the work wasn't so damn boring. My boss criticized me several times for only working 40-42 hours a week (not counting lunch), and there's a sense that the more time you log (literally, you log how much time you spent on what each day, in 15-minute increments) the better you're doing. I hear it's worse in TS and IS roles because they're customer-facing. - As a new hire, you are at the mercy of your TL (your immediate superior). Epic makes a proud point of hiring technical people to be managers, so in practice if you're a software developer or whatever and hang around for a few years there's a good chance you'll end up a TL, even if you're perhaps not great at supervising people. If you do not get along with your TL, working at Epic will be unpleasant, as there is really no way to switch, and they control what work you do. - Most people leave within a few years for the reasons mentioned above, and it's not very common to find someone who actually plans to build a future with the company. - I was lucky enough to avoid a customer-facing role (e.g. TS, IS), but those can be pretty awful with a bad (or even just difficult) customer, since Epic really sells itself on customer service. In practice you may have to be very patient with someone who has not paid attention and is very angry. A lot.