Great people, great culture, great work, but stressful and demanding. Leadership Problems. Awful Non-Compete.
Pros
- People are very intelligent, hard-working, and dedicated. - Co-workers tend to be friendly and willing to help out. - There is a good spirit of collaboration with people in the same app and role as you - Great food and a great campus - You get to work on something important (depending on app and role) - Salary and Benefits are really good for the Madison area
Cons
- The TS and other customer facing roles get very stressful and demanding due to Epic's obsession with having a high rating for customer service. You are also expected to get involved in extra projects. Expect at least 50 hours a week in customer facing role, some weeks as high as 80-90 hours. - The TS and IS role also vary a lot by customer with some customers being quite demanding and other calmer, so if you are IS and TS you could easily end up with more work than some of your colleagues. - The programming language that you use most often, MUMPS, is quite outdated meaning learning it won't mean anything to most software companies. If you have a developer role at Epic too long, you won't be able to easily go to other companies. - Epic has its own coding methodology and standards, so don't expect to learn methodologies that other companies care about. - The software development management leaves a lot to be desired and the development process could definitely be better. The development teams don't seem to work with much collaboration and the development is more piecemeal rather than project-oriented, which seems to cause unnecessary issues and overly complicated workarounds. - There are many parts of the software that seem unnecessarily complicated and could definitely be improved, but due to limited developer resources (Epic has a very hard time keeping/attracting developers) and a legacy attitude (that's just how it's always been), a lot of it remains unchanged. Epic is getting better with this, but there will be always be a lot to be desired. - The lack of overall development management and overly complicated parts of the software make the customer facing jobs much harder than they seem to need to be due to IS and TS having to pick up the pieces of leadership's mistakes. - Epic makes you sign a non-compete saying that you won't work for consultants or competitors for a year after leaving Epic. It does seriously limit your opportunities if you leave and is likely a way to demand a lot from their employees without having to pay them what they deserve and would get at other companies. Epic should be compete for the best employees and create an environment where they want to stay rather than forcing them to stay. - It is quite difficult to advance at Epic and the process is not transparent at all. The process of choosing TLs is quite unclear. How anyone advances past TL is also unclear. Unless you are a developer, you almost definitely won't advance past TL or one level higher as only developers seem to be in senior management. - TLs can vary widely in their standards, even in the same role, so two employees with the same role could easily be doing the same work but one TL will rate them higher while another will rate them lower. What your TL says about you sticks and it seems nearly impossible to contest what your TL says about your work. - Even though it may seem otherwise, Epic's senior management cares little about how satisfied its employees are and only cares about how satisfied its customers are. They claim they have a lower turnover than the industry in general but they are definitely not doing anything to make the turnover lower except possibly add little amenities that don't really make someone like their job more. They also dismiss the negative online reviews as coming from kids out of college who are not used to real jobs but there are definitely companies (many large software companies such as Google and Facebook) that hire a lot of kids out of college, have demanding environments, and have much better reviews than Epic.
