Pros
You might luck out and have a decent manager on a decent application yielding a pretty cushy job with decent pay and coworkers who at least pretend to be having fun. Your coworkers are smart.......if you've never worked somewhere, you have no idea what this means......never take this for granted as it's the best thing Epic has to offer and you'll probably never find it again unless you go to grad school, NASA, big tech, good startups, etc. If you stick around for a few years and try, you'll develop a good skillset that can be used for practically any IT project management or business analyst position. Most of the employees are young and energetic - if you are politically and sexually savvy, it's not uncommon to bang somebody for higher ranking/pay (or more likely the same ranking/pay, but you can slack more). How romantic. Epic does a fantastic job of donating some of its profits to local and national non-profits - this is truly laudable.
Cons
Expect your managers to lie to you and threaten you with more work (or termination if you're not that great). I had 3 different managers. One was great, but 2 of them lied to me directly about ranking/compensation. They'll be evasive at first with direct questions of rank, but when pushed they will nod along "yes, you're in the 90th percentile" and then screw you without warning when it's time to do an eval "oh, well, yes i did actually put you in the 40th percentile and i had no idea you were in the 80th+ last year and can't think of a single person in your peer group who is doing more or better work than you." Unless you luck out and get a good manager and there's very little work for your application, you will constantly be "voluntold" to do more, even if you're already putting in 55-60 efficient hours and traveling 3 of 4 weeks a month. Your boss is called a Team Leader (TL) - it's important to understand which 'team' this 'leader' is on - you will probably never work with your 'team' or your 'leader,' and your "leader's" only management duty is to get you to do more work, staff you to projects and evaluate you based on feedback that mostly gets fed to them. During recruitment/orientation/meetings with managers, Epic will tell you that hours aren't important - this is a LIE - when I challenged my ridiculous ranking (the mysterious drop from 80th percentile to 40th while being told I should be around 90th for the next eval) I was told by a TL of TLs that the hours logged in TLG are considered directly in workload/performance/pay evaluation (i had been lazy about unbillable hours because of those lies about hours/TLG being a non-factor). After my challenge, an email went out to the division reminding people to log all hours.....the email didn't explain why or apologize for being dickheads. BONUSES: maybe you've heard that bonuses for Implementers are awesome if you do a good job - that can be true, especially if you're 80th+ percentile; however, I'm pretty sure Epic pursues an intentional policy sometimes and definitely trims it back significantly every so often completely unrelated to Epic's financials or the world or U.S. economy....I believe this is an intentional policy to string people along (e.g. gamblers talk about winnings but rarely losses). With so few managers toward the top, there is enough mystery and speculation that my thoughts on this can only be substantiated by a very few.......but if you talk/read enough about Epic, you'll get a sense of the obfuscation Epic performs for it's employees and customers. You might be surprised or terrified to know that I'm not even close to a conspiracy theorist and yet have arrived at these conclusions. Anyway, there is a common saying around Madison that has a lot of meaning for this section: Friends don't let friends work at Epic.
