The company is like a country in the middle ages with a king/queen who only listens to good words. Internal meetings all filled with unrealistic compliments, and fake external ratings on Epic. Your brain is being washed to only accept those filtered news. This affects middle and lower managers who also only look up not down, pushing engineers to burnout.
The company is getting more and more bureaucratic in all processes. Everyone is burned out, so once I have a right to review your design or development, why should I do it quickly to keep the speed of the whole team? I'd let it sit there for a couple of days and until being badgered before the due time I start my review and then kick the balls back and forth for rounds. But on the other side, if yours is being reviewed, then it worsens your burnout.
The root cause of burnout is understaffing. The root cause of understaffing is a lot of money wasted on the fancy campus, and Epic is private without big external funding. Epic is reinventing wheels. This is costly. The wheels invented here cannot be sold to other companies, so it is a one-time use. Epic doesn't benefit from the community of software, nor does it contribute to it. A lot of wheels are clunky to use, since it is built by Epic only. For example, for the web migration, Epic builds a HyperspaceWeb layer, which you can think of something like node.js or similar. But such things can only succeed with talented engineers and thorough competition in the community. You can surely imagine how hard it is to code on such a framework for engineers. And not to mention that if you have questions you have to ask staff inside Epic, and you will also be asked frequently and is the only one to answer it, which further increases burnout.
There is no remote work chance, eliminating many outstanding candidates who don't want to relocate to Wisconsin. Many staff don't need to come to the campus at all. Even on campus, they are staying all day in their isolated offices, communicating by emails, phones and Teams. Judy doesn't want to waste the investment on the campus, but I have a suggestion for her to eliminate such concerns. See below in my advice to management.
