Epic reviews

There's a lot more substances than the Pros, but I felt like I needed to elaborate due to other post that share the same sentiment. (and a few more cause I feel like it) Customer Luck - You can get assigned to a very tough customer that will drastically raise stress. Sometimes you just are not the right fit for a customer and they request a new one (better find a new job). It's a tough situation when you replace a senior TS and left because they got burnt out with said customer and you can't provide the same amount of support due to your tenue. Management - I say management very loosely because everyone's experience is different, but it is a HUGE factor towards job security and job satisfaction. You will get assigned a TL who is just another TS with more tenue that was promoted from within. Some are helpful and will try to facilitate your growth, but more likely than not they are just there to make sure you're doing your job correctly and will urge you to work longer and "be better" or else. There are ~35 key areas that each TS should work to meet expectations. If Epic/TL wants to fire you, they will put you on an Action Plan or PIP for a few of those and gather evidence needed to fire you, as ticky tacky as some of them are. This creates an unfun power dynamic between working for your customer or working for your TL. You are expected to improve and gain experience FAST and can be too fast for some people. Turnover/Burnout - Yep turnover is high due to the last two points. They hire in large quantities fire those who don't fit into the Epic "mold" and train brand new people and of course those who do success will most likely get burnt out and leave. No hard feelings if you get fired after a year, it's probably been in the works for a while. 40 hours is what you're paid for, but realistically they expect 45+ hours a week. One my co-workers had to work 12-14 hours a day over the week between Christmas and new years because I went on vacation and ever since I've been scared to own anything internal because it's just going to end up being a time sink and adding more hours to your day. (They also were the only person that could do this one very important process in the entirety of Epic for every single customer for about a year so they were working overtime daily because there was not one else trained to help out and everyone that did know left...) Work from home policy - Epic has an almost cult-like vendetta against work from home opportunities. They try so hard to make sure everyone comes on campus everyday. 10-12 Half and Half days which equates to at most 5-6 full work from home days. Don't get me wrong, it's really nice to go to office hours in person and meet people face to face, but most the time I'm just in my office for the whole day. It's IT, I don't need to be physically in the office to do any of my job realistically. This won't change until Judy probably retires. The entire audience in Deep Space Boos when bad changes restrict WFH policy and I love it. (also COVID response was a big yikes) Also you HAVE to relocate to the Madison area and live within 45 mins of Epic which is a bit weird. Travel - If you like traveling, great. You'll more than likely need to add personal vacation days added on to your trip if you want to do anything. Most TS trips are for Go-Lives, which means 12 hour shifts at the installing hospital so there's no time to reasonably explore without missing out on sleep or resting. It's expected that you sign up for a few shifts a year which can be daunting for those who don't like to travel. UGM - If you don't know what this is, it's basically a huge event were all the CEOs are invited to campus for a week to hang out and go to sessions about upcoming features and give sessions to other customers about projects they've been doing. It used to be that other smaller customer roles were invited but I guess Epic as grown so much that they've had to drastically reduce the number of people invited. For example if you're on the Beaker team, literally no one of your customer contacts will be invited (unless you know the CEO for some reason), so it's just mostly annoying if you're not into it. It's a normal work day, with a lot more hoops and hurtles to runs through. Parking in a further parking lot or carpooling, have to dress business neat, and not to mention that all cafeterias are close for 2 weeks in advance (there's outside vendors which have gotten better over the years I've heard). Parking - Highly dependent on where you're office is. Yoda fills up soooo fast in winter and during UGM so getting there after like 8:30 there's a good chance it's all filled up as it's like the smallest parking garage that supplies 4-5 buildings in addition to designated customer parking for the learning campus. (there's an outside parking lot by the learning campus that's pretty convenient for a learning campus and a few prairie campus buildings, but it's closed for a good 5-6 weeks during UGM session in the summer which is super frustrating). Non-Compete Agreement - If you don't want to work in healthcare after this, then great, but if you do this can seriously derail your life for a few years depending on your contract. Once leaving Epic, you can't go into consulting (I think?) for 1-2 years which means you take a break or get a job in a different field. Apparently, some work at Epic to then go and get a BETTER job that pays better as an Epic consultent. Depending on the customer, you'll be working with ex-epic employees that make more and probably have a better work-life balance as they can work from home most of the time. Culture - There is a strong rise and grind culture here at Epic. They try to push work-life balance and fun after hour groups, but it's really a "if you don't go above and beyond then we'll fire you" type of workplace. I've only really have been nagged by my TL to work longer, but I've heard (and detailed 1 instance) stories of insane work hours that's celebrated. (Go-Live shifts are 12 hours long, no if and or buts about it) It's not uncommon to work harder that your perceived analyst contacts and are expected to own their projects. To be successful and happy at Epic, you need to be extremely strict about your workload balance while also maintaining a few internal obligations/projects and learn to say NO effectively. You'll also have to back up your word with the work you do too so it's a delicate balance that has a lot of places to go wrong. People - Wait I already put this in the Pros, why here again? Well it's really that 10% that get you down and out. It's very possible that you get along with everyone except your TL and that's just no bueno. Epic strives to be a great place to react out to people ad-hoc to ask questions and get help, but literally every person I've called ad-hoc for integrated issues have sounded annoyed that I called them so this isn't even true. It really depends on the customer and if they frequently have integrated issues that you build rapport with. (To be fair, I'm also been that person who is annoyed when some one calls me for an integrated issues I have no clue about). Some of Judy's Policies - I don't have any issues with Judy as a person I think she's pretty good and respect the company she's grown. I want to explain my neutral stance here. I just think that some of her decisions around WFH and other corporate policies are controversial. (She also kind of a grammar police and "commands" how to do stuff like not not including AM/PM when emailing availabilities which is always what I remember from those Staff Meetings. That's a nitpick, I just think it's kinda funny, not really a CON.)

Low bar for development (at least on my team) - many codebases are hacked together conglomerates of garbage from 5, 10, or 20 years ago. Management will actively refuse to delegate time or resources to re-write or refactor this code, leading to frustratingly difficult and long development times. This also includes being asked/forced to cut corners in your own development, so if you are someone that takes pride in writing good, clean, performant code, this can cause a lot of friction. Tech stack is pretty lousy. For most of the application teams, you'll work in C#.NET with vanilla Typescript (or Javascript if you're unlucky) and a no-SQL language called M that's hardly used outside of Epic. Possibly some minimal exposure to an Epic-specific flavor of React. Some teams use more SQL and there are mobile-facing teams as well, but the biggest part of the company is vanilla TS/JS and M backend. No Git, we still use SVN. No Jira, we have a terrible in-house product called EMC2. No unit testing, minimal automated testing. From a tech perspective, you likely won't learn too many transferrable skills here. Complete lack of support or options for work-from-home, remote meetings, or really any flexibility at all. Even meetings that are perfectly suited to a web cast, such as the required monthly all-hands meeting, are mandatory to attend in person. This meeting will provide little to nothing of value for your day-to-day work, unless you are interested in obscure insurance legalese or equally obscure grammar tips & tricks from Judy, but it WILL waste 3 hours of your Monday. Upper and middle management is WILDLY out of touch with the reality of workers' day-to-day life. Management is very fond of saying things like "web migration is over, we are going to see an explosion of new development in the coming months", when in reality they have been saying this for years and the promised new development has yet to even start. In the same vein, they instituted a policy where developers can take one day per month to fix something that they think is worthwhile, but in reality, developers are too busy fixing bugs and investigating poorly documented one-off customer crashes to ever take advantage of this "benefit". No opportunity for advancement, unless you want to become a manager. There are no official "senior", "staff", "architect", "tech lead", "L1/L2/L3", etc positions. You simply do the same work forever, with no official change in responsibilities and no say in bigger picture or longer-term decisions, even if you are the technical expert in the area (these decisions are all made by low- to mid-level managers, most of whom haven't written code in 5+ years). Company is also wildly understaffed at current. Teams are experience massive bug backlogs, which means that nobody is getting to work on fun projects or cool new stuff (I had gone ~1.5 years without working on a project), and the company has declined to hire more employees to fill this gap. This had led to a downward spiral of attrition, as tenured employees get tired of working on boring stuff, so they leave, which just leaves even more boring stuff left for the remaining employees, so they leave too, etc etc. Overall, I wouldn't recommend working here as a developer unless... - you are not a super ambitious person and are content to do mid-tier work with minimal advancement opportunity indefinitely, OR - You have no other (competitive) offers or options