- 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.
