Epic reviews

3.3

52% would recommend to a friend

(6,062 total reviews)
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Judith R. Faulkner

69% approve of CEO

75% positive business outlook

Epic has an employee rating of 3.3 out of 5 stars, based on 6,062 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Epic employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

6K reviews
1.0
Sep 26, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very talented coworkers Great pay & benefits Sets you up for success for your next job

Cons

Work/Life Balance is nonexistent. For an implementer (job listed as Project Manager), it is regular to average 60 hours/week only a few months into the job. The expectation is to help your customers for whatever they need, whenever they need it, which will lead to long hours and working nights and weekends. And there is no way for anyone to reduce your workload, so once you get to this point, you're stuck. Inadequate Training- Most employees come in without any sort of industry knowledge and are expected to learn an extremely high amount of information in a short period of time. During my interview, I was told that the first 6 months of the job would be dedicated to training; in reality, this was only 2 months, which was not enough time to set me up for success in my job (a concern I often expressed, but fell upon deaf ears). More Travel than Advertised- The role is officially described as 50-75% travel, but I was told in my interview that the average was around once every 3 weeks. I was a "lucky one" who only had to travel every other week, but others that started with me would have to travel 5 out of every 6 weeks. Very little effort is made to reduce the travel for employees, so again, once you get to this point, you're stuck. Lack of Transparency for Raises- No one knows how raises work at Epic. It has to be some formula based on some metrics, then out pops your new salary. Since your boss doesn't know what your salary is (find me five Fortune 500 companies where that happens...), you can't discuss this with him/her. The raises are very high, so few complain about the actual number, but how they come to that number is a mystery.

1.0
Jun 27, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good base pay, perks with traveling are nice, young company so easy to make friends if you live in Madison

Cons

Where to start... They expect you to know everything within a month of starting. But they don't tell you honestly what the job is when you interview; that's why they don't have a requirement for college major, so they get a good pool of applicants and they sell you the salary that you'll make. But they don't tell you what the job will actually be when you start, because then no one would accept the job. Do not work here, it's a trap. There's a reason the turnover is one of the highest in the country.

3.0
Jun 23, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- The salary and benefits are quite good for the majority of roles, especially since it's the first real job for many new hires (as it was for me). - I believe every salaried employee has an office, possibly shared with another person. There are no cubicles. - The campus' landscaping is nice. There's a little forest, a stream, plenty of interesting plants and flowers, a multi-purpose field, a lake, running trails, etc. And there are fun little touches scattered around campus, like a photorealistic painting of an orangutan on the wall of some outdoor stairs. None of this is necessary, but it is nice, and it helps keep Epic from seeming too cold and corporate. - Almost all employees are bright and helpful. I say almost, but I never actually worked with anyone really dickish. - The internal culture has a young, geeky bent. I remember seeing Arrested Development references in company-wide presentations and memes inserted into company-wide announcements. The newest building is Harry Potter themed, for god's sake. - Building on the previous point, if you're a recent grad coming to work here making friends is not hard, as there are literally thousands of people around your age. - Epic really does put a good product first. The culture of helping customers deliver the best care is repeatedly emphasized and not just a show when customers are around. - The food in the cafeterias (although I never ate at the newest one, which opened June 2015) is much, much better than it has to be. I would compare it to a restaurant with entrees in the $10-15 range, which is rather remarkable when you're paying $3-$5. The culinary staff manages to be both inventive and consistent, turning out competently-prepared stuff that isn't super inventive (e.g. roast chicken, green beans almondine, and mashed parsnips) and occasionally throwing down a few plates of avant-garde wizardry (once, I swear, there was a dish with lobster, shiitake mushrooms, whey, daikon, and dashi). They are great. It's the one thing about the place I really miss. - Madison is really not a bad city. It's usually described as the "Austin of Wisconsin", which isn't so far off-base. Some people complain that it's very white, which is only true if you stick around the capital area. Fitchburg (which is a few miles south of the capital), for example, is not very white.

Cons

- The work is dull. I spent all of my time fixing little bugs, which requires navigating Epic's complicated internal structure and writing everything in M, a really unpleasant language that no other company uses. This was the dealbreaker for me, because it meant every damn day was just 8 or 9 hours of uninteresting work. It actually takes quite a bit of work to understand the internal structure necessary to do dev work, and the kicker is it's mostly stuff that will never translate to any other job. Put bluntly, I looked around and saw nobody in the company doing work I wanted to do, so leaving (after a little less than a year) was an easy decision. This was far and away the biggest factor in my leaving. It's great to do challenging, interesting work for 50-60+ hours a week. Doing boring things day-in day-out for 40 hours a week is a nightmare. - The culture requires working hard. This would be fine if the work wasn't so damn boring. My boss criticized me several times for only working 40-42 hours a week (not counting lunch), and there's a sense that the more time you log (literally, you log how much time you spent on what each day, in 15-minute increments) the better you're doing. I hear it's worse in TS and IS roles because they're customer-facing. - As a new hire, you are at the mercy of your TL (your immediate superior). Epic makes a proud point of hiring technical people to be managers, so in practice if you're a software developer or whatever and hang around for a few years there's a good chance you'll end up a TL, even if you're perhaps not great at supervising people. If you do not get along with your TL, working at Epic will be unpleasant, as there is really no way to switch, and they control what work you do. - Most people leave within a few years for the reasons mentioned above, and it's not very common to find someone who actually plans to build a future with the company. - I was lucky enough to avoid a customer-facing role (e.g. TS, IS), but those can be pretty awful with a bad (or even just difficult) customer, since Epic really sells itself on customer service. In practice you may have to be very patient with someone who has not paid attention and is very angry. A lot.

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