Pros
- Surrounded by intelligent and motivated people (at Epic). I'm always thoroughly impressed by the people here. - Great starting salary for just out of college - You'll also be surrounded by other young people who have just moved, giving you a great starting friend pool - Fun, liberal, small city with stuff going on all the time - Cool looking campus. Won't really impact you, to be honest. More of an art museum than anything - Good food on campus cafeteria - Good health insurance + dental - Good amount of internal tools to help you out - If you're traveling, you can take personal travel at the end of it, paying only the difference in cost - Flexible work day (*potentially a con, when regarding number of hours) - Great place to work if you want to problem solve and overcome difficult challenges - You will be given ownership of important issues very quickly - You will learn life long career skills - Casual dress everyday! (Unless you're at a customer site, of course) - It is the best EMR, let's be honest.
Cons
- If you're looking for a 45 or under hour workweek, this is probably not the place. The average hours worked in EDI is just under 10 h/day but they expect you to have "crunch" time for 3-4 months of the year, where it will be even more. - You're bound to your projects' success. There is absolutely a lot of pressure to get things done even if it's more work than the full time 45 hours. If your team can't do it, you'll be forced to shoulder more of the burden, like a bad group project. This can become a "live to work" environment. - On that note, almost everything is almost always urgent. Be ready for stressful situations, constantly. - They hire people as needed, adhering to lean business principles. I'm sure it's economically efficient, but it's draining on the people. - They will claim that "Epic likes to challenge people". I think they it's debatable how much of it is putting people in new positions they can grow in vs finding someone who might barely scrape by with a lot of stress. You'll see this a LOT on the implementation side, where people of extremely low tenure might be put on a project midway, without the knowledge/skills required to succeed. - I also think this is dishonest to the customers, as there's no way this is ensuring the best possible outcome for them either. - Last note on this - transitions are usually pretty terrible (in my experience). For a place with such a high turnover, more focus really needs to be on good transitions. - After a certain point, the skills you're learning are so Epic-centric that it's hard to imagine you'll ever use the knowledge anywhere else. - Similar note: you'll also be working with outdated technologies or programming languages, like Cache. - Not really a con, but you'll be forced to work with sometimes sub-optimal analysts on the customer side (which is typical of any vendor/customer relationship). However, they can impact your life heavily through the feedback focused culture at Epic. I wasn't personally impacted, but I saw this happen around me, especially when people prioritized the project over an individual analyst's feelings - Analysts will rarely work overtime - and why should they have to? Epic's employees will always shoulder the extra work. - A lot of internal tools exist - which is great - but these are only the source of truth maybe half the time. The other half of the time, you have to find the one person who did the exact same thing as you but in a different state 3 years ago. The amount of silo'd information is staggering. Existing documentation can also be poorly structured and outdated. - The expectation is that if the information you find is wrong, you should take initiative and update the wiki accordingly. Good luck finding the time to do that consistently. There absolutely needs to be a stricter documentation strategy. - Winters are really cold - High turnover. - There's been roughly 50% turnover of the group I started with after 2 years. Reaching approximately 75% turnover on the project I was on. - Their incentives to cut turnover down are stuff like Sabbaticals (4 week flights-paid vacation you "earn" after 5 years). Not many people reach 5 years though. - Anecdotally, the number of people I know who have stress-related problems/depression is really high. This has impacted me and I've heard this a lot from others as well. Without numbers to back it up, I will leave it just as an anecdote. - No paid maternity/paternity leave - Epic has been sued more than once on overtime wage compensation. - Ancient legacy codebase. - Flat management structure. Not necessarily a pro or con, but listing it anyway.
