Epic reviews

The company's leadership actively (illegally) discourages employees from comparing salaries, which is incredibly suspicious when male employees tend to live on the isthmus in Madison and female employees generally live in cheaper flats elsewhere, with even more marginalized employees living in neighborhoods one could describe as poor. I was not able to get any accommodation for disabilities during training, and not being able to complete the training without accommodations I needed was ultimately why I was pushed out of the company so quickly. Epic has a reputation among former employees for its terrible work/life balance and its habit of grabbing new developers out of college, sucking them dry, and leaving them burnt out soon after with experience they may have trouble using elsewhere. There is no management to speak of, thanks to Epic's relatively horizontal structure. They make it sound like a great idea at first, but then you find out you're answering to someone who became a supervisor on technical merit alone and has exactly zero formal training in management or supervision. My own supervisor, for example, tried to solve late work from their team by making everyone do more and more meetings and time management exercises, which caused even less work to actually get done.

- 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.