Epic reviews

I came into the company with a lot of years of PM experience, so my perspective is vastly different from others here. I have worked for major tech companies on the West Coast and currently working at Microsoft. If this review sounds like bitter apples, it's not because I didn't excel at Epic or was fired and couldn't find another job. Any bitterness comes from the fact that I wanted the company to be as good as it says it is. Bear in mind that Epic pretty much hires liberal arts grads (for implementation and QA) straight out of undergrad. They spend a great deal of time and money training the new hires. I clocked the number of hours we spent talking about dress code. YES, dress code. Oh, you don't know how to use OneNote? or Outlook? Ugh. So much money and time wasted training for things that any person with just a few years' experience (or common sense) would know. I'm here to tell you, the employees are NOT brilliant, and the company is NOT innovative. The Epic system is scalable but it is not and never will be cutting edge. The employees are told they are "scary smart" and since they have a job making a laughable 65K - they believe it. BUT they would be eaten alive at any solid tech/software firm anywhere else (if they somehow got past the front door). The pay, benefits, career opportunities, and yes, even the beloved cafeteria are a joke in the industry. Everyone raves about the cafeteria, but it pales compared to other similar-sized companies I've worked for in California and Washington. If you choose your future based on where you are going to eat lunch, you have bigger problems than Epic. You will also read a lot about the hours and hard work. Yes, they push you to work long hours. Why? Because the average employee age is 24, and they have never had a job before. They have to work long hours just to figure stuff out. I'm not joking. In my hire class of nearly 400, most of them had NEVER used Outlook. If I spent any of my bandwidth trying to develop an efficient time management system as a project manager, I would be working 80+ hour weeks too. Just putting together a simple presentation takes days and days of work and practice for these kids. Ask an Epic PM about waterfall or Agile and they will look at you like you're speaking a foreign language. It's seriously like working on the high school yearbook. A lot of kids who think they are smart and know what they're doing, and Epic puts them into a bubble so they continue to think it's true. Want to know about the culture at Epic? Read Lord of the Flies. How about an example of the advice I got from a senior PM? Always buy gum at the airport on the way home because you can expense it. I am NOT joking... That's the level of sophistication you will find here. The rest is just a lot of Epic talk about how good they are, and when you're stuck in Madison, never having worked anywhere else, and with nothing else to compare it to, you can easily start to believe it.

-Company relies on a revolving door of fresh university graduates who are used to being overachievers and haven't had experience setting healthy workplace boundaries -The lack of boundaries becomes such a norm that people regularly lie on their timesheets to hit an accepted sweet-spot of 45-55 hours of work a week (which is still too much for salaried workers), despite having many weeks of working 60+ hours a week -The addiction to overwork so strongly dominates the work culture at Epic that even experienced workers who know how to set healthy boundaries constantly feel discouraged from setting or maintaining those boundaries -If you manage to survive at Epic for 3 years, your work-life balance should start to improve, but seeing how often people are disappearing, that's a big if -Pay tends to be less than industry standards for many of the roles, often because folks are hired without previous experience -Epic has been really resistant to remote or hybrid work, and would have forced workers back to the office on multiple occasions in 2020 if it hadn't been for the intervention of concerned workers and the health department of the local government -Not a friendly environment for folks who experience various mental health struggles or are neurodivergent -Marginalized folks are under hired, undervalued, and constantly disrespected