Epic reviews

You will soon learn that all of the nice stuff is for customers on-site, and you when you were interviewing. Now that you are part of the machine, you are nothing. Your talent and effort is extracted, you do work to a quality and quantity commanding a $300k salary for under 6 figures, and when you burn out you are replaced. During a staff meeting we were once asked if we'd prefer to keep a sabbatical every 5 years or instead have an extra week of vacation per year. The vote was to keep the sabbatical. I now see why they'd love that: very few people make it to the requisite 5 years. It all soon begins to feel fake and hollow. "You choose your hours just get your work done," turns into "45 minimum," turns into "I know it'll take 60 hour weeks to meet these expectations but you can always just be fired if you don't like it," and some people are doing 90 hour weeks. You will never, EVER be compensated appropriately for the work you put in. Being paid above average to do mind-boggling amounts of work is not a fair trade, and you could at times make just as much per hour of your time working at McDonald's flipping burgers, ironically probably with a lower blood pressure. Uptime is second to upgrades and changes. This causes problems. Whatever demand the customer has, no matter how absurd, you're gonna make it happen and suffer for it in most cases. No time to socialize or enjoy the campus, food, or the company of your coworkers. I should have walked as soon as I heard "Work-life integration," out of the CEO's mouth.

The extent of how bad your experience will be depends on your department: Accounting/Finance - The worst. Don't feel bad for not being accepted into a "FINANCIAL ANALYST" position, since that's all utter bullshite since there is NO corporate finance department here and none in the works (though they might lie during the interview to tell you there will be). You will actually work as an Accounts Receivable employee and you will likely have your title changed within a week of arriving to "accounting analyst". If this is your first ever job, you will be less disappointed since you will have no basis for comparison; however, if you've held other positions, you will invariably not be happy and feel the company has screwed you over with a "bait and switch", lying its way into convincing you to pick up your entire life to move to freaking Madison, Wisconsin only to be miserable with a terrible go-nowhere job in a small town and be stuck there, too exhausted to rejoin the job hunt. The position is well-suited to 2 types of people: 1) Straight out of college, NO professional experience - Unless you would have gotten a job via nepotism, this is likely better than your average post. However, only stay for 1-2 years and begin searching for something better AS SOON AS you are confident enough to feel you can convince an employer to hire you. While Epic is made to feel like college, with its classes, lunchroom and omnipresent children, remember that when you are staying at work till 9pm and ask yourself whether it's really worth it. 2) From Madison and/or married and/or with children - You're not interested in a career and you don't mind mind-numbingly dull and unimportant work which everyone around you has been brainwashed into thinking IS important. You will care only about being able to live in Madison near your family, making an above average salary for the Midwest (where costs are far lower than elsewhere) and being able to support your family for the next 30 years you'll spend in this hellhole. You're willing to sacrifice 1/3 of your life for the 1/3 where you are neither sleeping nor at work. Judy is running a company with over $1 billion revenue and yet still signs off on amounts of a few thousand dollars, or insignificant 1-2% price increases for a small part of the business. (Even universities don't waste half the time she does on increases which barely outpace inflation.) As a further example of the ridiculousness here, the CFO brings the CEO monthly reports which include how we spent $60 per gift for 25 gifts and asking whether that were to much. Can you imagine?? Meanwhile, the firm's entire accounting department is run out of EXCEL!!! Spreadsheet after spreadaheet after spreadsheet, some which are tens of thousands of lines long! The place is utterly ridiculous. This department is the WORST and I advise extreme caution if you are not in one of the 2 categories enumerated above. Otherwise, you will want to kill yourself every day and you will resent Epic A LOT for having tricked you into moving to Madison. ********************************** Bottom line is that Epic sucks unless you are 1) straight out of college and need $ desperately and are unwilling to wait the extra months it would take you to find something actually related to your field of study or your dream career, 2) from Madison and wanting most importantly to be near your family and to make a better-than-average salary and/or 3) you are married and/or with children and want to set up shop in Madison because real estate is rather cheap here and it's probably the best city in the Midwest after Chicago (although the Midwest is not personally my dream region to begin with). Again, one of the other list items should also hold true, 4) you don't care about a career or any long-term growth prospects. You've decided to take on the white-collar version of the factory worker because you are happy to sacrifice 1/3 of your entire life just to have better-than-average disposable income and are unwilling to try to carve the same path for your dream career. (This, to me, is the saddest and most depressing category, but there are PLENTY of people here who fit the bill and put on artificial smiles to try to cover it up and convince themselves they've not wasted their lives away : '- (