Not many career opportunities afterwards
Pros
- By and large, the Technical Services role gives you the opportunity work fairly autonomously. You are assigned to 1-5 customers (depending on your application) and it's up to you to prioritize the requests of the customers you work with and determine your schedule. There are times when your schedule is dictated by customer escalations or unrealistic promises from IS/Sales/R&D, but by and large you are the arbiter of your own time. - For a new college grad, the benefits are mediocre to good (depending on where you did your undergraduate). The TS role primarily targets engineering/math/physics majors -- your friends who graduated and went into defense or finance will be making more out of the gate and have a higher earning potential, but you will have a lower cost of living since you live in the midwest.
Cons
- Aside from salary, the "benefits" are non-existent. It's 2015, and no self-respecting tech company should consider "Wear Jeans to Work" or "Free Coffee and Juice" as actual benefits but Epic does. The salary is very competitive for the position (essentially a glorified help desk), but that is counteracted by 1) the drudgery of the work you do, and 2) the fact that you are required to live in Madison. This would be like any other job, except at Staff Meetings you are continually reminded how the "benefits" are integral to the Epic Culture. If you take a second and look around, you will realize those "benefits" are really inconsequential. - Dead end career. If you're looking at the TS role, you likely graduated with a technical degree and can find more meaningful employment elsewhere. The TS role is essentially a help desk, where you field calls from analysts at different hospitals who are poorly trained and woefully unprepared for a career in IT. Your primary job function will be looking up things in manuals that your customers have access to, but are unwilling to read. There is occasionally a need to "dig in" to the codebase to track down actual software bugs, but that tends to be rare. You are a help desk employee, and that greatly limits your opportunities at and after Epic. - By and large, the management structure at Epic is awful. I was a Team Lead, and I've seen behind the scenes where people are promoted for technical skill without displaying the ability to effectively manage people or projects. New Team Leads attend one or two half-day leadership workshops at the UW campus, "read" some assigned books, and then they are put in charge of other's careers. The system of promotion and management is irresponsible and ultimately unmaintainable. Look at all of the critical reviews of Epic -- they all have a single thread in common, the poor management of employees and company culture. - Overall, the bubble of Electronic Medical Records in the US is popping. Epic has already sold to the meaningful consumers of this technology.. any organization in the US that doesn't currently use an EMR is being penalized by the government. This means you will be working for new customers who are just trying to meet the bare minimum to avoid penalties, not "change the world" like Epic would have you believe. This is an industry that is primed for a shake-up by some disruptive start-up that can manage to get HIPAA under control. You'll have a job for the next 5 years, but is it really the job you want? and what happens after that, if/when the bubble pops and your incredibly specialized skills developed maintaining a proprietary codebase on a dying programming language are no longer needed?
