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.

1) As a software developer, you will work either mostly or entirely with tools that are not widely used by other companies. VB6 and Cache are not widely used (thankfully) by pretty much any other company out there so if/when you want to change jobs you will have to either study hard for tech interviews and/or have kept up with what's new in the developer community. 2) As a software development team lead (basically a middle manager) I spent a lot of time speaking with Epic's customers. Unfortunately most of this time was spent writing down the customers' mostly legitimate complaints and trying to placate them as much as possible given we weren't going to solve most (if not all) of their issues any time in the near future (probably not even within the next year or 2). 3) Software you develop will not be used by customers in production environments for 2-3 years. This is really unsatisfying. 4) There's no such thing as working too much at Epic. As a manager most requests for more team members go unanswered. 5) if you're a software developer and have good management / people skills you can find yourself writing no code very quickly. If you're like me and enjoy the mentorship and product input that management bring at Epic but still want to write code you'll likely want to escape Epic before you're no longer able to program anymore. 6) The way in which they evaluate people is really messed up. There's a lot written about how Microsoft does it. Epic is very similar in a lot of ways.