Epic Reviews

Pros

Opportunity to shape position into something interesting, ability to lead high-profile internal projects, ability to lead and manage others within first year, young and energetic staff, good compensation after first year, Madison is a great college town to live in

Cons

Work/life balance non-existent (long hours, 50% travel, need more recovery days for traveling on weekend), lack of recognition, lack of employee involvement in company strategy (everyone is a worker bee except CEO and her handful of staff), overworked employees due to fast growth that hiring can't keep up with, high turnover leads to a sea of new employees with very few experienced employees to mentor and teach them

Advice to Senior Management

Turn customers away to avoid overworking employees, or come up with a more effective hiring and training strategy to deal with turnover

Pros

- Smart, friendly coworkers who are good at getting things done
- Developer-oriented workplace
- Great meals that are highly discounted (although not free)
- Cool campus with lots of art
- Great on a resume, especially if you stay in the Madison area

Cons

- Many strict, inflexible processes. Deadlines were automatically set as soon as you started working on something, and you had to talk to a team lead to change them. I was on a big team; I think some of the small teams were better.
- Fairly long hours, and before deadlines all developers had to stay till 9 pm some nights regardless of what work they had to do.
- Long commute if you want to live near Madison itself.
- Outdated technology. I didn't mind Mumps, but VB6 is terrible. Hopefully they've made progress on the transition to C#.

Pros

Highly motivated, hard working, fun and diverse employees
Amazing campus and culture

Cons

Bad management, career paths are not clear, zero transparency, little to no work life balance, they dont care if you leave or stay with the company, high burn and churn - almost 90% of my starting class(around 40 people) and a couple of starting classes prior to mine have quit!, lack of emphasis on professional growth...

Advice to Senior Management

Building pretty buildings and giving everyone great offices are great but you should seriosly think about strategies for retaining employees. You should become transparent and also provide professional and leadership growth opportunities.

Pros

The coworkers are fantastic. I can count on people I work with to be smart and good at their jobs and to help me when I need it. I feel like what I work on makes a real difference in people's lives, helping doctors and nurses take better care of patients. Overall, the company is ethical in its dealings with customers and generous with charities.

The compensation is generous.

Upper management communicates at length with employees in monthly staff meetings, so you know more about what's going on than you would at many companies. It is privately owned, so you can be confident things won't change abruptly in unpredictable ways due to acquisition, merger, or generally stockholder pressure.

Epic is a process based company, and the processes have logic behind them.

Cons

The form opinions about people quickly, and it can be hard to change them. The flat hierarchy is good for many things, but "advancement" in terms of higher titles and more official authority are frequently unavailable.

If you get a less experienced manager (which can easily happen), you need to help him or her manage you or you can end up with too much work, and I see plenty of younger employees who struggle with this.

Internal development management tools are awkward, and improvement of them isn't a high enough priority.

Advice to Senior Management

Add additional channels for escalation. There should be someone approachable who is outside the normal management structure that frustrated employees can talk to.

Pros

-Brilliant, fire-in-the-belly coworkers
-Fantastic work environment; individual offices, great food, casual dress code
-Company mission is easy to get behind

Cons

-Severe lack of feedback given regarding job performance
-Lack of transparency
-Poor work/life balance

Advice to Senior Management

If you insist in hiring the best of the best, treat them that way. Also, lack of middle management is crippling company growth and communication to new folks; changes in company organization need to attempt to catch up with explosive growth.

Pros

You learn more and experience more day by day. It's an active workplace with great environment and friendly employer.

Cons

It has busy environment where you can get ignored sometime.

Advice to Senior Management

They offer you to handle and manage small project sometime, hence any skill with IT project management is a plus.

Pros

Non team lead peers are usually very competent and have strong desire to learn more.
Customers enjoy seeing you on-site and what you can produce for them.
Healthcare is cheap..

Cons

Employees are ranked on a numerical scale by team leads who have never interacted or been on a project with you. The rankings are done against people who started around you and against people you are on the same project with. So if you have 6 new hires on your project that work as application coordinators, you could be considered number 6 and your direct boss will know this throughout the duration of your career. This number that gets assigned to you will directly determine your end of year bonus, raises, and chances of promotion within the company. The ability of a team lead to judge your work performance is one that is almost laughable, as everyone is out of the office most of the time. In one summary, this company and its feedback system forces your career to be judged by what others think of you, rather than what kind of work you actually produce.

At this point Epic has caught up with it's hiring, or should I say, realized it stretched itself too far during the summer of 2011. If you are part of or will be placed on an application suite with too many people, team leads have began the snipping process. Apply here if you wish, but know that your chances of being here long term beyond meaningful use or Democrat's term in office are much less than they would've been a few years ago. The industry is still hot, but with over 1500 hired in the span of 3 months things just cooled down a notch. The trend has reversed, and it would be wise to stay away from such.

You will get daily reminders not to talk about the company negatively on the internet or with your peers, like I'm doing right now. Having a differing opinion from your direct boss "team lead" as they call them, who is usually a 23 year old kool-aid drinker of Judy Faulkner, marks the end of your career, but more importantly, the beginning of a better one.

As a project manager, you're actually at the bottom of the totem pole of the company, which is backwards to how every other engineering/analyst relationship works outside of Epic. Your career will basically be summarized as follows: your customer asks you for a special design in the software to fit their model, you beg the software developers at your company to sign a change order and make an exception for you, they refuse, and you go back and tell your customers no. They scream at you and say "we paid 150 million for your software and this is what we get?" The developers run the show here, project managers are just customer service agents who simply pass the word on, as disappointing as it may be. But oh lets not forget, its all about the tone and style you pass the word on.

One negative that many other companies have is that situations, decisions, can become political. You may think it's a good thing when I say that this organization isn't political, but unfortunately that's for one reason: the organization is run by a dictatorship. The organization is run very similarly to a church during the Medieval times, you simply listen to what you're told, true or not.

Advice to Senior Management

It appears you guys are starting a new model, where full time managers manage a large group of 20 or so team leads and transition away from customer facing work. Looking through Guru before my departure, I noticed most of these "managers" have been with the company for 2-3 years, and are responsible for managing prior managers who have been with the company for 8-9 years. If you want a real career in personnel management, I suggest leaving and finding a real management career at a Fortune 500 company where your managerial skills gained from your MBA education are utilized and you can develop a sense of style that's respected by peers over time. The day you leave Epic, you will notice that management is no longer about memorizing and regurgitating a redbook of rules.

Pros

Young company (median age around 27)
Nice new campus (still expanding) with no cubicles (although you may share an office with 1 co-worker) and high-quality cafeteria
Every 5 years, employees earn a sabbatical (4-week paid vacation to another country)
Every employee receives a Christmas card with a $100 bill inside (in addition to any performance-based bonus)

Cons

Highly stressful
45 hours a week considered the minimum
When traveling to customer sites, 12-hour shifts may be required
If scheduled to work both days of a weekend, only 1 day off is rewarded
Technical services role frequently required to carry after-hours pager for emergencies - no compensation for hours worked outside of regular business hours for these emergencies
Epic software is complicated to set up, and upper management is trying to shift more of the burden for the set-up to Epic employees (Technical Services in particular), than to staff at the customer site

Advice to Senior Management

Some customers have employees that can be quite poisonous to the relationship between Epic and the customer; it is quite acceptable to let upper management at the customer site know this. If one person at a customer has complained about 10 Epic employees on a 15-member team, it is probably the person at the customer who needs to looked at, not the next Epic employee that person complains about.

Pros

Benefits are excellent - never saw a bill for health or dental visits
Good food - caters to all dietary needs and ethnicities
Physical workplace is nice - lots of open spaces and windows
Underground parking - no scraping windows in the winter
Epic certification is highly regarded, and Epic is a great company to have on your resume

Cons

If you like having three miserable full-time jobs at once, this is the place for you.
Job #1 - training classes of 30-35 people every week. The classes are a mix of computer folks with no healthcare experience, healthcare pros with no EMR experience, and consultants fresh out of college with no knowledge of either. They will be from lots of different organizations, all with different needs, and will compete with each other to control the classroom with innocuous questions. If, as a trainer, you don't answer all their questions, you will get bad reviews. If you do answer all their questions, you'll get bad reviews from others in class who think you're catering to the questions. Did I mention that you have to train people on text-based programming, people who've probably never used it before, and then keep them from crying when they get frustrated because their bosses want them to get certified in eight weeks (which is WAY too short to understand Epic software)?

Job #1A - training internal classes of anywhere from 20-100 new employees. These are kids just out of college, who are used to Facebooking/texting/sleeping in class and don't care about knowing anything, unless they think they can show you up. Their reviews also count against you, even though they have no idea what the standard is that they're supposed to be using.

Job #2 - designing lesson plans, E-Learning lessons, and/or other educational materials. These will be minutely dissected by a team of writers, QA'ers, and other trainers. Furthermore, if someone along that chain doesn't think you got it perfect the first time, they'll tell your TL and get you on the naughty list.

Job #3 - grading papers and reviewing tests. You get to be a grad assistant! You get to deal with perfectionists who demand to know why they only got a 99% on a certification exam, or conduct reviews over the phone with the consultant who has failed a test three times, doing worse each time, and practically begs you for answers. It's fun!

Oh yeah, Job #4 - you may be lucky enough to be a consulting trainer, which means in addition to doing ALL of the jobs above, you'll be on the road every few weeks to help customers set up their training programs. I didn't do that very much, so I can't speak to how that goes very accurately.

Advice to Senior Management

In a company of over 5000 people, you have less than 30 clinicians on staff. Your best employees are waking up, and they are leaving. The hubris is going to catch up, and the bubble is going to burst. I don't know when, but it will certainly happen.

Pros

You constantly challenged and rewarded when you succeed. There is always something new and you are getting experience at an age where you wouldn't get it elsewhere.

Cons

Epic doesn't know the meaning of work/life balance. They expect you to work hard, put in alot of hours, and always go above and beyond. You are rewarded for it but this can still be difficult at times.

Advice to Senior Management

I love the Epic philosophy but sometimes it can burn people out who would otherwise be an extremely valuable asset to Epic.