Epic reviews

The COVID response in 2020 was shameful and terrifying. Epic planned to bring back all employees to campus during September 2020 despite COVID being at an all time high and trending higher. Epic classified workers as "essential" despite the fact that many roles (SD, QA, TS) can do their jobs 100% remotely. The development process is tedious, bloated, and full of unnecessary roadblocks. The tech stack is pretty frustrating to deal with at times. Leadership has been showing its age and has unrealistic expectations of its staff. Employees are pressured to work 50+ hours a week. Work/life balance is not part of the culture at all. Being overworked is celebrated but ultimately leads to burnout. Remote work is treated with the utmost disdain. Epic makes you sign an arbitration agreement and a 2-year non-compete clause on your first day. This contract was used to block employees from collective arbitration. Check out the Supreme Court case Epic v. Lewis. Prospective hires are not warned of this contract during the application process.

- You are viewed as a replaceable unit of labor. - Management does not trust you or care about your wellbeing. - If you are struggling mentally or experiencing burn out, if you don't perform well, management will make no effort to intervene and help you out. - Some senior developers will treat you like you're dumb when they probably couldn't get a job outside Epic at this point because they lack basic modern technical and conceptual developer skills. - The way HR goes about pairing incoming new hires with teams doesn't make any sense, and makes them appear completely out of touch with what the company is even doing. - Management is out of touch with the reality of the industry and don't understand that they are fighting a losing battle in the long-term. - Performance metrics are narrow and don't account for your whole job (while being subjectively weighted by high performers), despite affecting whether you get fired or not. - It's impossible to ask questions without feeling like you're wasting somebody's time, and communicating this with management rarely results in change because as soon as you start asking a reasonable amount of questions, you'll be accused of asking too many questions and not doing enough research on your own, which rarely makes any sense considering how poorly documented and designed most of the code-base is. - It appears that management doesn't possess the ability to self-reflect or empathize with coworkers. This is because most managers are picked from the pool of high performers, so they act more as gatekeepers of acceptable performance, despite obviously being biased against what an average acceptable workload should be. - The performance metric system just makes most developers petty and pits them against each other instead of fostering an environment for collaborative growth. - Most software developers writing web code are out of touch with modern web development and still think they're writing Visual Basic, and will try to make you rewrite JavaScript to include micro-optimizations that only apply to VB.