Epic reviews

Middle management has no management experience. Team leaders are promoted from the ranks of TS. Great customer service skills do not necessarily translate to great management skills. Also, the work/life balance is non-existant. At hiring, new employees are told that a 45-hour work-week is average. If you ever fall below 45 hours, you will get bad feedback from your team leader at your next weekly meeting. Flexible hours are listed as a perk for prospective hires, and it's true to a point--you're flexible in how early you come in before 9am and how late you stay after 5pm. If you have to take off for as little as 30 minutes, you have to notify no less than three people, more as you're assigned more customers. Epic is gaining more customers faster than it can hire (and it hires fast). It takes 3-6 months to train an employee, and another 3-6 months after that before the new employee is capable of solo work. This means that as we gain new clients, existing employees are strained more and more, and we have to put in more and more hours. This is fine for fresh-out-of-college people without established families, but if you've got small children, expect never to see them. Every day of FMLA is given begrudgingly. If you want to leave Epic, good luck finding another job in the field. Epic has a non-compete agreement that new hires must sign, that prevents them from working with Epic for a period of one year after leaving Epic. Given how quickly new Epic modules/products come out, good luck staying current for that year. Epic's clients, though, are willing to pay up to 50% more than Epic for certified employees, but they won't take ex-Epic employees because of the non-compete. Epic uses Cache/MUMPS and Visual Basic. Nowhere else uses those languages anymore, so good luck finding a non-Epic IT job. The culture was once a friendly and open one, where other TS were more than willing to chip in for other TS' crunch times. Now, everyone is strained to the limit, and no one has bandwidth to spare. Finding qualified help for large scale projects is nearly impossible. In the TS role, you're expected to be a jack of all trades, and master of most. Since everyone is strained, expect to reinvent the wheel often. You'll notice every so often that a Current Epic Employee will rebut a negative review of Epic. Former Epic employees have never (from what I've seen) posted a rebuttal.

Employees are treated like children. The company practices ageism in hiring (if you're over 30, don't even bother). There's a severe lack of experienced employees due to their too-rapid growth and constant turnover issues (largely due to travel-related stress and disgust with all the rah-rah corporate brainwashing). The campus seems nifty at first, but the forced quirkiness quickly gets irritating and then downright obnoxious. Due to the lack of a dress code, the employees dress like children or homeless people. Middle management is incompetent (promotions are largely based on who puts in the most hours). All real decisions are made by the top 10 or so senior managers, so unless you can get one of their jobs (you won't) there's no real upside for your career. You only get paid once a month. You will be thoroughly trained on your application, but not on your actual job responsibilities, so that when you actually start work you'll be expected to BS your way along until you figure out what's what. You will be pressured to "get with the program" and become an "Epic person" like it was some kind of cult, and Heaven help you if you get on Judy's bad side. The company is still basically being run like a startup with 100 employees rather than a major enterprise with 3000, leading to bottlenecks and all-around cluelessness. The company is also managed based on KLAS industry surveys, so a single bad review from a single disgruntled user can dramatically effect the whole organization's strategy. It's unlikely you'll actually have your own office for the next year or two until the new buildings are up, though they may tell you otherwise. The employees, while admittedly smart (though not as much as many of them seem to think), are mostly inexperienced and directionless Midwestern kids who just wound up here because they thought the place looked neat, not because they ever intended to work for a medical software company, so don't expect much ambition or drive from your co-workers (except for the true believers, there's always a few of them), and don't be surprised if half of your fellow new hires quit in the first eighteen months. And as for Madison, make sure you own a good parka, and be prepared for the 40k drunk college students clogging up all the downtown bars, parks, concerts, sidewalks, bike paths, apartment buildings, etc.