Epic reviews

Work/Life balance is non-existent from the very beginning. You will travel much more than is comfortable, get used to very little sleep, and work constantly. The work load is often crushing. Additionally, the PM role is much more technical than the interview process will lead you to believe – which means many PM’s are forced into a role in which they do not fit well. The company is focused on calling out weaknesses, rather than letting employees play to their strengths. Many work long hours to avoid letting items slip through the cracks as they will hear about this relentlessly in feedback sessions. Bonuses and raises are left completely up to the subjectivity of the TL’s (Team Leads). So, you’ll often hear, “if your TL doesn't like you, you’re screwed.” And it's true. Epic is a company that treats customers extremely well, but employees quite poorly.

To someone who has never had another job after college the long hours and high stress with little support start to seem normal. Epic will admit that they aren't in the business of growing their employees so if you make one mistake you'll quickly find yourself on their bad side and out the door soon after that. Middle management is a joke, your boss is usually someone who was promoted because he or she was best at following orders and his or her only training in management was a couple books from their reading list. For that reason it's luck of the draw whether you will succeed there since this is the person in charge of determining your worth as an employee. To make matters worse, Epic says that it will invest in your training, but that investment turns out to be the bare minimum necessary which is not nearly enough when you are tossed into the deep end of your projects. From a developer's standpoint, the company is kind of a mess. The primary languages you'll be using are VB6 and Cache, both of which stopped being marketable ten years ago. If you're lucky like I was you'll get to work in the new C# framework, which is nice but because it's so new even the basic parts of it are bug-ridden and help can be hard to find. Finally "software must work" is one of the cornerstones of development philosophy at Epic, but it so often doesn't. The complexity in possible configurations of the software combined with the lack of time and real clinical workflow experience on the part of the QA team means that bugs are often uncaught until some customer finds them which piles more work on your plate. Your biggest mistake at Epic would be to take the job without having a plan of escape.