I used to recommend Epic as an excellent place to start your career. Their embarrassing response to COVID-19 has changed my mind.
As an Implementation Consultant, I averaged 62 hours per week over four years. I woke up thinking about work, and went to bed thinking about work. As a manager, I was expected to frame everything as a relentless positive. Have a client who harasses or berates you? An opportunity for growth. Land at 1am and be expected in person at an 8am meeting every Friday? We do such important work, that’s just the cost of it.
Epic’s management team is caught in a past world where leaders rule by edict and norms never change. When announcing smaller bonuses because of COVID-19, they could have chosen to explain how saving money here allows them to commit to zero COVID-related layoffs. Instead, a two-sentence email saying “you should be glad you even get one.” Epic has consistently misstepped with its work from home policy, touting its campus as a core component of its culture and crucial for its survival. While the rest of the tech world embraced health-first policies, Epic announced that WebEx meetings were awkward and people were distracted by children, so work-from-home would end. Its all-employee e-mails about campus safety and pandemic preparedness were signed from “the real doctors”, many of whom haven’t practiced in decades and none of whom are epidemiologists, in response to employee concerns about masks, social distancing, and bringing the disease home to their families.
The result? Perhaps 50% of employees on campus wear masks in high-traffic public places like the cafeteria. Parents must scramble for childcare, when schools and daycares are still closed. Pregnant women must email the COVID-19 resource group and ask for an exception to continue working from home, even though pregnant women are hospitalized and ventilated due to COVID-19 at a higher rate than the general population.
I thought I missed Epic. I’m glad that I left.
