Lack of consideration for employee's wellbeing and highly politicized internal environment
Pros
I really enjoyed Epic when I first started, there's a thorough training program you go through in your first 6 months and if you're coming straight out of college, it can feel similar to the study / exam style you're familiar with. You also receive a lot of responsibility and autonomy early on. I was staffed within my first 3 weeks and was client facing shortly after. While this can be a deterrent to some folks (sink or swim culture), I found it challenging and engaging. You definitely grow quickly into your role. I also loved the people I worked with, everyone was intelligent, driven, and compassionate. Everyone is motivated to make the system better for end-users and it shows. You also have the opportunity to work with different organizations with a variety of different cultures. In my last year at Epic I transitioned to their Boost consulting branch and enjoyed that as well. If you don't want to travel constantly and you want to live somewhere outside of Madison, it's a great option. However, there are many cons that come along with it since Epic doesn't want to encourage employees to go remote (see the Cons section for more details).
Cons
If TL;DR -- Epic leadership doesn't care about retaining employees no matter their tenure or value to clients. It's unfortunate because Epic has some great talent that they're hemorrhaging right now. To start, Epic is very anti-WFH. They claim it's because of the "culture of being together" and how that "fosters creativity" but the reality is that they continue to build these million-dollar buildings on their Madison campus and they don't plan to slow that down. Instead of focusing on how employees appreciate flexibility and how client travel is actually easier from places outside of Madison (MSN doesn't have direct flights to many destinations), they continue to force employees to work from work full time. This then goes into many complaints about the Boost program. Boost sounds great, you can work from anywhere, you're a full-time consultant rather than juggling multiple projects at a time, and you have a lot more work/life balance. But all of that comes at a cost. Epic leadership makes efforts to disincentivize the program by cutting benefits (when I first started, there was no PTO), reducing pay (my raise after 3.5 years at the company was $1 more per hour, it was insulting), and treating you as a new employee to Boost rather than recognizing you're transitioning from Epic into Boost (i.e. you have to wait 6 months to start earning vacation). I get it, they don't want employees to go remote because of all the buildings, but if Epic employees can't go remote and Boost isn't a viable option, then people are going to continue to leave. In general, pay and benefits are worse compared to other technology companies and it's justified by the location and the "culture." The culture is incredibly toxic with a constant focus on how many hours did you put in. If you didn't put in 60+ hours a week, you're labeled a slacker. The internal culture is very political where a few folks seem to call the shots and they stick around so there's no opportunity to transition into those roles. The worst part is the non-compete. You can't immediately work for competitors or clients. They also extend this non-compete time frame for Boost roles, dependent on tenure. This not only hurts employees who could make significantly more money and grow into leadership roles within client organizations if they were full-time employees, but it also hurts the clients who then have Epic support constantly rotating because people don't stay at Epic for more than 3 years. And as you can tell by this review, Epic leadership doesn't listen to employees. I escalated many of these points during my time at Epic and put it into my departure survey 6 weeks before my end date and not a single person reached out to me about my sentiments. At the end of the day, Epic just doesn't care about employees and unfortunately it shows.
