Epic Software Developer reviews

Management is not trained well, and managers are chosen by productivity and loyalty, so the quality of your boss is luck-of-the-draw. Some of them are fantastic! I was lucky enough to have an outstanding TL for many years, and they were the primary reason I've stayed at the company so long. Many, however, are middling. And some are unbelievably bad. Getting out from under a bad TL is difficult, and a bad TL can irreparably stunt your career at this company. The company itself often has good intentions, but once a decision is made it is nearly impossible to question it. And upper management is not always the most reasonable or scrutable entity. There is a case study in Epic's COVID-19 response: despite a steady climb in cases, the entire company is expected back on campus mid-September. (And I suspect that, even after we are all back, we will still be holding most meetings remotely -- we'll just be "remote" from our solo offices. Not the most effective reason for thousands of people to commute when working from home has been effective so far!) Our CEO has stated that this is because we are "losing big time" because our culture suffers when we work from home. This seems like a thin excuse, but it's the kind of decision that is unquestionable, handed down from the CEO herself; decrees like this are not rare at Epic. Another case study can be found in the case Epic brought before the Supreme Court of the United States, which resulted in permanent damage to workers' rights across the nation (search Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis). At the monthly all-hands meeting, the company's involvement was defended with the reasoning that, had we not brought the case, some other company would have. The answer to the question of why we needed to be involved at all, if the court's decision was so foregone, was left as an exercise to the listener. Epic's motto includes "Do Good", but this is obeyed piecemeal and only when it suits us.

Unlike others, I actually find the average quality of developers to be quite bad at Epic. We aggressively hire kids fresh out of college, and our hiring bar seems to be quite low. As a result some teams have dumpster fire code bases. It's a complete crap shoot whether the team you end up on will have good coding style and a reasonable code base. I've worked on open source projects and for other companies, and Epic has by far the worst code base I've ever seen. It looks like this is probably trending up over time. The company is heavily driven by process. Getting work done is often very hard because of the process. I'm often either fighting the process or doing my best to subvert it so I can actually get stuff done. Working with customers is often frustrating. The huge demand for health IT workers has lead to customers hiring woefully inadequate employees. Doing your job often means holding customers' hands and doing their job for them. Couple that with childishness about timelines and issue, and you have a pretty poor experience. The technology stack is gaaaaaawwwwwddd awful. The homegrown web frameworks are hot garbage. VB6 is still heavily in use. Also, we've switched our recommendations for what to use in the language stack multiple times over the last 3 years. As a result even brand new code uses old standards almost immediately after it's wrapped up, and our 'new' code base is a mishmash of multiple competing frameworks, libraries, styles, and languages. Context switching takes up a huge amount of time. It's like we took all of the worst parts of micro-services and shoved them into a monolithic code base. The system 'architects' making decisions for the company seem to just be throwing darts to figure out what cool new thing to jump on to next. On the web side you do at least get to use C#. On the server you use MUMPS or a TS to MUMPS transpiled language, which further creates confusion. I actually like using plain MUMPS. That's not a popular opinion, but the average developer doesn't seem to actually know the language despite how crazy simple it is. Speaking of, several language features have been deemed off limits because we can't expect the average developer at Epic to do it right. You're quite literally held back by your coworkers. Epic eschews a lot of benefits common to other technology companies such as flexible working hours and locations. Despite the shtick about flexible hours, it's been my experience that it's a lie. They expect you to be there from 9-4. Deviations result in negative feedback. If I remember correctly, the core working hours used to actually be officially written in the internal company handbook, but they took them out a little while ago. Based on my experience this wasn't done to make it easier to work flexibly; it was to allow managers to inconsistently apply requirements. While lower level management is often competent, upper level management is completely out of touch with reality. Getting into upper level management seems to require fanatical devotion and unquestioning loyalty. The punch is very good indeed. Decisions are made capriciously regardless of how far-reaching they are. Process is blindly followed and applied without thought. Speaking out against blindly following process is a sure-fire way to get in trouble. It's also a tremendous waste of time. Blindly following process is heavily encouraged at all levels, which creates some blindingly frustrating scenarios where we do the wrong thing because the process demands it. Recent decisions surrounding working from home have made it very clear that needs and safety of employees is a distant second to productivity and company culture. This is especially frustrating given that all the quantitative data I have access to actually says productivity for R&D has gone up since working from home began. The take away seems to be that sacrificing employees is ultimately worth it to avoid some perceived loss in company culture that we can't describe or track with data. A company call reinforced this; upper management indicated that 'data doesn't tell whole story, and we'll never be able to quantify the loss from working from home'. TL;DR, we don't care about your data; you're coming back whether you like it not. You won't change our minds.