Epic Software Developer reviews

Unlike others, I actually find the average quality of developers to be quite bad at Epic. We aggressively hire kids fresh out of college, and our hiring bar seems to be quite low. As a result some teams have dumpster fire code bases. It's a complete crap shoot whether the team you end up on will have good coding style and a reasonable code base. I've worked on open source projects and for other companies, and Epic has by far the worst code base I've ever seen. It looks like this is probably trending up over time. The company is heavily driven by process. Getting work done is often very hard because of the process. I'm often either fighting the process or doing my best to subvert it so I can actually get stuff done. Working with customers is often frustrating. The huge demand for health IT workers has lead to customers hiring woefully inadequate employees. Doing your job often means holding customers' hands and doing their job for them. Couple that with childishness about timelines and issue, and you have a pretty poor experience. The technology stack is gaaaaaawwwwwddd awful. The homegrown web frameworks are hot garbage. VB6 is still heavily in use. Also, we've switched our recommendations for what to use in the language stack multiple times over the last 3 years. As a result even brand new code uses old standards almost immediately after it's wrapped up, and our 'new' code base is a mishmash of multiple competing frameworks, libraries, styles, and languages. Context switching takes up a huge amount of time. It's like we took all of the worst parts of micro-services and shoved them into a monolithic code base. The system 'architects' making decisions for the company seem to just be throwing darts to figure out what cool new thing to jump on to next. On the web side you do at least get to use C#. On the server you use MUMPS or a TS to MUMPS transpiled language, which further creates confusion. I actually like using plain MUMPS. That's not a popular opinion, but the average developer doesn't seem to actually know the language despite how crazy simple it is. Speaking of, several language features have been deemed off limits because we can't expect the average developer at Epic to do it right. You're quite literally held back by your coworkers. Epic eschews a lot of benefits common to other technology companies such as flexible working hours and locations. Despite the shtick about flexible hours, it's been my experience that it's a lie. They expect you to be there from 9-4. Deviations result in negative feedback. If I remember correctly, the core working hours used to actually be officially written in the internal company handbook, but they took them out a little while ago. Based on my experience this wasn't done to make it easier to work flexibly; it was to allow managers to inconsistently apply requirements. While lower level management is often competent, upper level management is completely out of touch with reality. Getting into upper level management seems to require fanatical devotion and unquestioning loyalty. The punch is very good indeed. Decisions are made capriciously regardless of how far-reaching they are. Process is blindly followed and applied without thought. Speaking out against blindly following process is a sure-fire way to get in trouble. It's also a tremendous waste of time. Blindly following process is heavily encouraged at all levels, which creates some blindingly frustrating scenarios where we do the wrong thing because the process demands it. Recent decisions surrounding working from home have made it very clear that needs and safety of employees is a distant second to productivity and company culture. This is especially frustrating given that all the quantitative data I have access to actually says productivity for R&D has gone up since working from home began. The take away seems to be that sacrificing employees is ultimately worth it to avoid some perceived loss in company culture that we can't describe or track with data. A company call reinforced this; upper management indicated that 'data doesn't tell whole story, and we'll never be able to quantify the loss from working from home'. TL;DR, we don't care about your data; you're coming back whether you like it not. You won't change our minds.

- Recruiting will outright lie to you during the hiring process. This is especially true for developers because they don't want to have to explain about the languages we actually use. Instead we internally created a whole new language framework which we don't really use just so Recruiting could say that we use Typescript across the entire stack to potential new hires. - Unending critical projects get dumped on development because Sales constantly over-commits. - Upper management is completely tone deaf and unwilling to hear any criticism or feedback for company policy. Current response to any feedback / criticism is "please support". - Below industry average vacation benefits. Yes, Sabbatical can shift the weight on this calculation, but no one tells you that Sabbaticals are not guaranteed and can be denied. I've had several friends get to the tenure for their Sabbatical only to be denied. - No respect or valuation of experience. Almost all employees are treated as replaceable cogs. We've lost decades of experience for easily avoidable reasons. - Bonus / Raise / Stock options are completely black box and do not account for customer facing work that is outside of your typical role. You are encouraged to grow and take on new opportunities but are not rewarded for doing so. The metrics which you are judged by are kept secret. - Anti worker policies and actions. (supreme court case), secret backdoor non-compete agreements with other companies to extend your non-compete length regardless of what non-compete agreement you actually signed in your contract. - Very difficult to strike a good work/life balance, especially for new grads right out of college and Epic takes advantage of that. - Shifting to a different developer position at another company is difficult due to the tech stack we work with. Getting out of healthcare is difficult, and staying in healthcare is complicated by an extremely long non-compete.