I may be spoiled by some of the awesome places I worked before and since joining Epic and I was probably way over qualified to work at Epic, but I found Epic to be the most tedious work I've experienced in my life. Epic has a culture and the right kind peer pressure to get people to work way more than they would want to. Most people in my role were way over worked. I'm a very gifted person, but I found the amount of work dished out to Ambulatory TS would require 60 to 80 hours/week to do it correctly though the recruiters promised less than 45. Most everyone in my role who has been there less than 3 years was stressed and overworked. If you want to have family life do not take a job there. As a TS, you always have to be there from 9 to 5. But you also have to put in many extra hours to get your work done.
I decided to hold my work to the 45 hours per week to see how long I could hold on. In practice, this meant prioritizing so that only the most urgent things would ever get done, ultimately resulting unsatisfactory work.
You are pressured to not take vacation in big clumps, but rather one or two days in a week. When you take a day off your work piles up so you have to work extra long on subsquent days to make up for it. Hense, there are *no* real vacation days. I think what Epic is doing should be illegal.
The code base is *very* poorly designed and documented. It can not be commented on because that slows the ancient code. Worse, the code is not written in a nice modular fashion. It must be getting more and more unmanagable with each passing year. Different parts of the code duplicate functions in inconsistenet ways. It takes a long time to fix or change the simplest things because there are always a lot of unintended consequences. It is difficult for people to build code that interacts properly with all the other parts. Because developement is so troublesome they have to rely greatly on quality assurance testing to find bugs, on technical services to fix things, and on a lot of work to produce on a reasonable time scale. Because it is such a tangled mess, nothing can be sufficiently documented and a great deal of *research*, trial, and errror has to be done to fix things. I believe this is why their work ethic is currently so extreme.
Because there is not enough time for individuals to get their work done, it is a very poor environment for innovation. I'm a world expert in another field, well respected for my innovations. But at Epic, I deliberately held back ideas because I did not want to add any more workload to myself. Most of Epic's innovations consist of listening to customer requests and implementing them in a hap hazard fashion. I believe there is great opportunity for a company with a better designed code base to surpass Epic on a short time scale by making the development process more efficient through better modular code.
Interestingly, Epic people like to spread the idea internally that they are really smart folks, but I think it is just propoganda to get people to stay there. I have worked with much more gifted, creative people elsewhere (but in a different field). First rate people can and will find a better job than working at Epic. I would have left much sooner but I had family oblications to stay in the Madison area.
