- It's not a matter of balancing your job and your life, because any "balancing" decisions are made for you. If you get dealt a bad hand, then you're out of luck. Got staffed on demanding customers, with a lot of upcoming projects? Well you have to meet all of their needs, regardless of how much it cripples your life outside of work. And your customers don't know what your other responsibilities are (Epic does not want you discussing other assignments, which is understandable), so you pretty much just have to bat them away while you stomp out a fire for another customer. In short, you are spread way to thinly.
There's never time to just work at a normal pace and check tasks off a list; every day, you try to barely make the deadlines for the most critical issues on your list. And critical problems can pop up at any given time, so you never really know which days are going to be the painful ones. If you have the misfortune of two customers escalating issues at around the same time, you'll be struggling to give time and communication to both of them. Let's just hope you weren't also covering for someone else, and their customer has a problem. It doesn't help that the other employees staffed to the same customers as you are blind to all other issues your working on. So it's often expected that their most critical issues become your most critical issues, even when they secretly know that that's unreasonable (but they probably have someone prodding them, as well).
Management is pretty out of touch with what employees are doing. There's no real way that they evaluate if you've been assigned too much or too little (but too little probably never happens), so unless you constantly complain, your problems aren't heard. And even when they are heard, it seems like your manager is powerless in fixing any problems. Probably because EVERYONE is already filled to the brim with work.
HR claims in the interview process that you'll work 45 hours on an average week, and 50 on the occasional busy week. This is not true at all. It is significantly more, then you burn out, quit, and have to dump all your work on some unsuspecting new hire. A good week was 50-60 hours. Then there would be an 80-hour week about once a month.
- Travel is too frequent, and all on your own time. That means you're gone on weekends, and traveling during the evenings (after working full days and weeks). Traveling to a new place might sound cool, but you will be doing nothing but work while on these trips. They include night shifts as well, with no time to adjust your sleep schedule, so you're a walking corpse for at least a week. A lot of sleep deprivation and extra hours are involved in traveling. HR will pitch to you that TS travel maybe 4 times a year. I went on about 10 trips in a 6-month period. The personal fun I got to have on these trips was minimal.
- Pay. You'd think that all this stress would at least pay really well, but it doesn't. It's a good starting salary for a recent college grad, but then you find out how much of a struggle the job is. And, given the caliber of candidate HR claims to recruit, you'd expect the pay to be much higher, if people of that ability level are so stressed out.
There is no overtime, or comprehensible benefit to working as much as you'll have to. The best you can hope for is that, if you're vocal about how hard you've worked, the mysterious black-box raise process may treat you well. But even then, it raise is still pathetic for what you have to deal with.
It definitely doesn't help when you find out that you can make 2 to 3 times as much for doing an easier version of the same job as a consultant or analyst. The customer teams you work with, the people YOU ADVISE, all make significantly more than you. I guess that's why Epic is ramping up the non-compete agreements.
-HR. Everything they say either turns out to be a lie, or feels like a lie. They recruit you, and then you don't deal with them until your last day, during the exit interview. All complaints you make during your stay never reach their ears.
-Training. The training you do get is good, but not nearly sufficient. You are thrown into customer work before you have any idea what they're talking about, so you're scrambling for months to try to keep them calm. Most of the "advanced training" is just attempting to teach you to damage control issues and keep your customers from finding out that you started 2 months ago, and are now in charge of their project's safety and success.
SUMMARY: Way too much work, for not great pay, and an extreme amount of stress. You are asked to sacrifice your personal life for the company, and don't get much in return. Unless you are planning on making your career and existence in this industry, the job will feel like it's just taking years off your life. Ultimately, the pain became too much, so I decided to quit and take my life back. The sad thing is, I was actually good at my job, and my customers loved me.
