Epic reviews

Poor work-life balance: Epic recruits smart, driven recent college grads. The overwhelming majority have competitive Type-A personalities, and the most successful employees are workaholics who will do anything and everything for Epic and its customers. This creates an environment where employees’ interests are always secondary: while Epic initially provides solid training, mentoring, and salary, this is used as an excuse to ask employees to give more time and energy to Epic and its customers indefinitely, without any expectation of reciprocity. Since most of your cohort are recent childless college grads, they will be able to accommodate these long hours and constantly changing priorities; employees with children are expected to “figure it out” and are provided no flexibility and basic benefits: standard FMLA, no on-site childcare, no work-from-home. Even worse, the fact that others have “figured it out” in the past is consistently used as an excuse to continue to provide barebones benefits and re-enforces this toxic work-life-balance across the company. When the CEO talks about taking her child to sales meetings or giving her contractors the keys to her house so she can be at work instead, she sets the expectation to everyone that Epic will always prioritize its interests before its employees, their families, or their time. Poor management: Team Leaders at Epic have little flexibility in changing your day-to-day work-life and are not empowered to make decisions that most managers typically make at other companies, like hire/fire, role transfers, or budgets. TLs at Epic are expected to be the mouthpieces for upper-management and administrative policy: any exceptions must go through your TL, who works on your behalf. This structure lacks transparency and accountability for the TL, who is left on their own to make a compelling case for the exception; staff are left out of the communication process. A Team leader’s primary role at Epic is to funnel opportunities to you, collect feedback about your performance, and complete performance reviews; execution is inconsistent. I had one written performance review in my first three years at Epic, and it is likely your TL will have as much tenure as you or less, meaning their advice becomes less relevant the longer you are at Epic. TL’s expectations of their team members’ performance vary, and it’s up to the TL to communicate these expectations, leading TLs with poor communication skills to have frustrated and poorly ranked team members. When you take concerns about your TL to upper management, some will listen, but most will stand by your TL and will interrogate you about what you’re doing wrong and shoot the messenger. Overall, Epic’s culture holds upper management as sacrosanct, team leads as unaccountable, and team members as interchangeable cogs in the machine. Mediocre benefits: During interviews and on-boarding, Epic makes a big deal about how great their benefits are, but they're expecting you won’t compare. Health insurance is good—no co-pays or deductibles—but most software companies have competitive health insurance. IRA and other financial benefits are pretty standard for comparable roles. Vacation, FMLA, and sick leave are not competitive relative to other employers in the area. Sabbatical is a nice perk, but inflexible and bureaucratic on when you can take the time and where. Prior to COVID lockdowns, work from home was nonexistent (two days per year) and upper management has been outright hostile to expanding the benefit. Epic will tell you they support continued education, but what they really mean is that you can continue to get training and certifications in other Epic applications beyond your core role, attend in-house seminars and professional development classes, and pursue a software development certificate program with UW that can result in a Master’s degree. I asked several times about getting an MBA covered by Epic as a strong performer interested in management and was denied; some well-connected team leads are able to access more education benefits, but they are not universal, and those employees were given no flexibility to attend classes during business hours.

Company is high stress, management is hit or miss