Patronizing culture. Upper management think they know best, and not all feedback is treated the same. There's a fair amount of opacity. For example, there's a ranking system that feeds into your raises and bonuses somehow. No one is allowed to know their rank, and feedback for employees around growth is filtered through this fact that they can't know what they're being compared against or what circumstances are holding them back if their manager isn't good at handling this type of feedback system.
The type of development you're doing won't get you far elsewhere - cache isn't used elsewhere, so the most translatable coding skills are if you work on web development.
There's a lot of overtime. 45 hours is the average expectation. Not all teams/devs work that much, but there's a lot of expectation that to be excellent you need to put in a lot of work, and you really need to be responsible for your own work/life balance.
Epic has a lot of sink or swim mentality, and a feeling of "people couldn't make it" if they leave because they don't work well there, regardless of many of those people being successful devs elsewhere.
At Epic, you're expected to manage your own project - define, scope, design, develop, ensure testing timelines and quality is met, etc. There's other people who are also supposed to do these things, but ultimately it's the developer's responsibility. This means a lot of pieces that are usually done by other roles at other companies are at least partly dev responsibilities at Epic. It means a lot of devs who "don't succeed" at Epic do succeed elsewhere, where they can focus on dev alone. This isn't always true at Epic, but I saw it enough to believe it's a trend.
