Good salary & healthcare, but poor management and culture and no respect for employees
Pros
The salary and healthcare benefits are great, and you're living in a relatively low cost part of the country. The work itself is usually challenging and can be impactful, depending on what team/customers you end up on. The people that work at Epic are generally very smart and always willing to help out, so that makes for a great work environment.
Cons
Epic's upper management does not know how to effectively lead a large company. The company exploded in size in the early 2000s, and the leadership team was clearly not equipped to build/maintain a positive culture of a larger organization. There are no avenues to collect feedback from staff at large--when I started at Epic Judy would semi-regularly "poll the audience" during staff meeting and make sweeping decisions based on who raised their hands in an auditorium of 9000 people. In the years since even that (poor) level of engagement has disappeared--open-mics at staff meeting have gone away and questions are screened and removed ahead of time if they're deemed 'controversial'. Judy and the rest of upper management are far removed from the day-to-day job of their employees and are not willing to listen. Any ways that staff have tried to channel feedback as a group get shut down, with employees being told to "talk to your TL", who holds a similar level of influence as you in the grand scheme of things. It often feels like there's a certain level of resentment Judy holds against employees for wanting to see changes in the company (whether its benefits or management), which becomes evident in some of her staff meeting presentations Beyond leadership, Epic has a toxic culture for overworking its employees. Especially early on in your career you will be pressured to work longer hours. Raises and bonuses are a black box system where you have no idea what went into the actual calculation, and you can't discuss it with your manager because they don't even know how much you make(?!). It's a very bizarre, closed-door ranking system where you aren't even to vouch for yourself and need to rely on your TL to vouch for you instead. If you end up with a bad TL well then you're out of luck, and there's no shortage of bad TLs to go around Epic since they take the same approach to management as they do to hiring in general (throw bodies at the wall and see what sticks). Your career at Epic is going to be partially determined by luck. The app and customers you get staffed to will greatly impact how much you enjoy your job and how much of an impact you can actually make at the company. Your TL will also be a big factor in your job satisfaction, and as I previously mentioned that's also going to fall to the luck of the draw. While Epic's salary and healthcare benefits are great, you only get 3 weeks paid vacation a year max. The sabbatical is a nice perk to add to that, but ultimately shakes out to capping at 3.8 vacation weeks per year when you factor it all in, which to me is not a number I want to sit at for my entire working career. Epic also lacks any real work from home/remote policy, so if you don't like Wisconsin or need to move for family/health issues then you're pretty much out of luck. This is another example where the tech industry has evolved to the point where many companies support are offering remote positions, but Epic is lagging behind. It comes down to leadership not respecting or trusting their employees, and regular-level management not being properly trained. Epic, with the patient at the heart and the employee not considered
