;tldr If you're coming here for reviews after visiting the campus for interview, the gist is this: what Epic appears to be -- a fun-loving, hip, innovative company -- and what Epic is in the day to day are not the same. Epic is a massive corporation, and their goal is to make money. So, do your research before signing on!
Epic tries to have a start-up culture, but because it's a 10,000+ employee organization, it cannot be a start-up. There are protocols and rules and barriers to innovation and mobility. They say that they love having so many new and young people come in with fresh eyes, but my experience showed that they are very resistant to change. People get in the groove of doing certain things in certain ways and unless you can prove, on your own time and effort, that your tasks are, for example, a significant waste of time and money, then nothing happens. The culture is not innovative and does not prioritize quality-of-life improvements.
Management is not great, because most of the managers have less than 2 years experience being a manager. That's because once an employee has been there for a year doing whatever they're doing, and they perform decently, then they're pressured to become a manager. Now Epic has all these managers who don't know anything about team-building, team solidarity, or being good listeners. Epic managers tend to be gatekeepers. They're there to make sure that you're performing, and if not, prod you to perform more, work more, take more responsibility, and so on.
If you don't have professional experience, are new to customer service, new to healthcare IT infrastructure, don't know anything clinical workflows, the first six months are genuinely brutal. Listen brother, sister. The first sixth months are absolutely brutal. With only barebones training, you will be assigned to be the Epic/clinical/software expert to real hospital IT staff who are responsible for the healthy functioning of the healthcare software. You will have imposter syndrome, because you will actually be an imposter. Even though you will have your manager and a mentor to help you, they will often be too busy to fill in the training gap. Real people will be counting on you to give them professional, accurate consulting that will impact the safety of real patients. If you're okay taking on that responsibility in your third month, then all the power to ya. For me, I couldn't sleep for a year.
Epic does not have a healthy culture of work/life balance. Instead, and I'm speaking both from personal experience and from relationships with coworkers, that Epic actively pushes employees to spend an absurd number of hours per day (11.5 for example!). Epic does not reward good work with better work, they reward with more work. If you're half decent at your job, your manager will push you to work no less than 45 hours per week. If you're really good at your job, then you will be pushed to work 50-60 hours per week. When giving feedback to a manager about "being stressed" or "having too much to do", instead of lightening your load, they'll pressure you to become more efficient at your work, when the real problem is simply that the load of responsibility is too great, and you can't do everything yourself.
If you're saying something to yourself like, "I'll start off as a Technical Support engineer or whatever, and then when I show that I'm a good worker, I'll move into a position that I'm more interested in." Don't count on it. Epic has an agenda. If you fit into its agenda in a certain position, you won't make it out for years.
If you're not a young white person, then you'll be in the small minority.
If you choose to work at Epic, bear in mind that for at least a year after a departure, you will not be able to work for any healthcare organization that uses Epic. So all that experience you gain learning healthcare IT, clinical workflows, etc, you will be hard pressed to use it after Epic.
