Epic Employee Reviews about "upper management"

Cons

- Recruiting will outright lie to you during the hiring process. This is especially true for developers because they don't want to have to explain about the languages we actually use. Instead we internally created a whole new language framework which we don't really use just so Recruiting could say that we use Typescript across the entire stack to potential new hires. - Unending critical projects get dumped on development because Sales constantly over-commits. - Upper management is completely tone deaf and unwilling to hear any criticism or feedback for company policy. Current response to any feedback / criticism is 'please support'. - Below industry average vacation benefits. Yes, Sabbatical can shift the weight on this calculation, but no one tells you that Sabbaticals are not guaranteed and can be denied. I've had several friends get to the tenure for their Sabbatical only to be denied. - No respect or valuation of experience. Almost all employees are treated as replaceable cogs. We've lost decades of experience for easily avoidable reasons. - Bonus / Raise / Stock options are completely black box and do not account for customer facing work that is outside of your typical role. You are encouraged to grow and take on new opportunities but are not rewarded for doing so. The metrics which you are judged by are kept secret. - Anti worker policies and actions. (supreme court case), secret backdoor non-compete agreements with other companies to extend your non-compete length regardless of what non-compete agreement you actually signed in your contract. - Very difficult to strike a good work/life balance, especially for new grads right out of college and Epic takes advantage of that. - Shifting to a different developer position at another company is difficult due to the tech stack we work with. Getting out of healthcare is difficult, and staying in healthcare is complicated by an extremely long non-compete.

Cons

* Upper management is terrible (they deliberately ignored requests from employees about a meaningful DEI committee and offered a completely tone-deaf 'alternative' to WFH/remote work that is intended to eliminate it) * 401(k) matching is not great (50% up to 6%? Pretty sad honestly) * Maintaining culture for the sake of culture, often to its own impediment

Cons

-The quality of your work life will be mostly dictated by the team and application you are placed on as well as your role. Your team placement is solely at Epic's discretion. I was lucky and got placed on a team that had a lot of smart, capable people who I found easy to work with and allowed me to maintain good work-life balance, but if you read the other reviews here you'll see that this isn't the case a lot of the time. -Very little remote work flexibility. Employees are required to work in office basically at all times and must live within a 45 minute radius of the campus, which is in the vicinity of Madison, WI. People in the SD role should take particular note of this because all of the other product roles have the option to go remote with Boost after a few years, but this usually isn't available to developers because we don't do customer facing work. Also, the fact that the company campus is well outside of the city leaves you with a difficult choice: live in the actual city and deal with long commute times, or leave near work but miss out on the interesting parts of Madison. -Very sub-par PTO by tech industry standards - employees get 10 days of PTO to start, which increases to 15 at 2 years and then never increases again. I noticed an interested pattern during my time at Epic where most of the departures from my team were people who were from places that were very far away from Madison, and I think this had something to do with it - with only 10/15 days of PTO and no remote work flexibility, it becomes very difficult to visit friends and family that are far away. -Upper management is out of touch and refuses to acknowledge any feedback that they don't like. -The tech stack is ancient and drowning in technical debt. Additionally, all of the development tools and frameworks tend to be very unstable and difficult to work with because it's all built in-house and supported by understaffed teams within the company. Add on all of the risk management and complex processes that come with working in the healthcare space and you end up with extremely long and difficult development timelines for even the simplest features.

Cons

Upper management has had an extremely poor response to COVID and is unwilling to engage in dialog with employees.

Cons

General cons * Only 5 remote work days. You can split these up and work from home for up to 10 days. *Relatively low vacation. Not as many holidays off. Job specific * The job is fast-paced, challenging, sometimes high-stakes, and sometimes frustrating. You can come in with a plan in the morning, but other priorities will often pop up and shift your plans. You might feel inundated with support requests, calls, and emails. * When things seem broken and you're not sure why, then you will consult with teammates or pass along diagnostic info to developers. You'll sort of be a middleman between them and the customers, and it can feel like it drags on your productivity to keep the emails going. * Many issues only occur under specific conditions or configurations. You often end up having to ask IT staff a checklist of questions on how they are setup because you're not always able to review their systems to confirm for yourself. This can be time consuming and it adds up to a point where you feel like you're on calls for most of the day.

Cons

Upper management lies regularly and sales regularly screws over implementation and TS by making impossible promises.

Cons

Discriminatory hiring practices. If you aren't in your low to mid 20s and a recent college graduate, don't bother applying as >95% of new hires fit that description. The CEO is on record as saying they don't want older folks with prior job experience. Work/life balance. This isn't a place where you can work 40 hours in a week and be done. Depending on your role, most employees are staffed for 45-55 hours/week minimum. Some have to spend significant time away from home (>50%). Other roles have expectations to be on call 24/7 periodically. Upper Management is out of touch with the real world and expects to control your life outside of work. They've sent emails to just the employees of color here telling them how they are allowed to protest the criminal justice system and supporting the police. They tried to tell the department of public health that requiring work in the office during the COVID pandemic counts as 'remote work.' They tell employees where they're allowed to go during the pandemic while not at work while simultaneously not requiring our employees, customers, and guests in the office to wear masks (until it became a legal requirement). Their only justification for not allowing work from home, even during the COVID pandemic, is maintaining company culture despite all metrics show us being more productive working from home. They ask for feedback on policies but if you don't agree with leadership's opinions then you are ignored, have your feedback deleted by admins, or are demoted as evidenced by recent news articles.

Cons

Upper management is disconnected from employees and likes to start initiatives to make things harder for us.

Cons

- The company has poor stuff retention. Everyone is constantly leaving - Super strict on in-person work even though the work can be done remotely for the “culture” - Engrained and normalized especially by upper management that you should dedicate your entire life to the company - They currently have a staffing problem, so nearly all their projects are short-staffed, short of more tenured people. For this reason, they throw in a lot of new hires to their projects as soon as like 3 days into work

Cons

-Upper management doesn't care about workers' health; WFH was not given UNTIL 3/17/2020 due to COVID-19, and it wasn't even MANDATED (still encourage us to go to work). I live with my parents (both in their 60s), and I do NOT want to risk giving them COVID-19 as we have project management coming in from Seattle/Bay Area/NYC (affected cities). REALLY TOUGH ON WFH - probably because they spent millions of dollars building a campus. - Can take UW CS courses, but in order to get tuition reimbursement, you need to stay for two years (something not said in my interview). - FAVORITISM - Your manager has a direct impact on your raise/bonus. If they don't like you, then you will most likely not rank as well. - POSSIBILITY OF BAD LUCK - if you're IS/TS and your analysts suck at their job, you will be burdened with having to make up for their inexperience.