A straightforward entry point into tech, but come with an exit strategy
Pros
- The health insurance is unbeatable - The salary is enticing, especially for the fresh graduates - The role sets you up with technical, customer relations, and project management skills. With two years of experience, you can easily transition to a career elsewhere. - The people you get to work with make the job bearable. Epic truly does a great job at hiring talented, intelligent, and sociable folks.
Cons
- Your experience is driven heavily by your assigned application, manager, and customers. It's not uncommon for customer counterparts to be extremely rude, demanding, abusive, and completely out of touch with the software they are supporting; upper management knows this, but won't push back on it because "the customer is always right". - Upper management and the company as a whole are hostile to employees. There are some bigger things (take a second to Google the response of this healthcare giant to a global pandemic and the president's thoughts on DEI in the workplace) that have been more public. There are other aggressions that are rumored (but that the culture makes people, myself included, find very believable) including union busting, employee suicides caused by the stresses of the job/lack of support, and management demotions for speaking out on aforementioned issues. - There's an unspoken expectation that you work 45+ hours a week at a minimum. Folks that are "only" working 40 hours a week are flagged as having capacity for more customer commitments. - This job requires more from the TS role than is standard in the industry. Through the job search and my own experience in my new role, I've come to understand that customer success managers and technical support are two different people at most tech companies. - Flexibility around work location is limited. WFH existed during the peak of the pandemic (and the initial attempt to end it was August 2020), but has been more or less eliminated. Before I left upper management was clear that it wouldn't be an option for any substantial amount of days. Five days of work from anywhere is still the policy as far as I'm aware. - Limited vacation/sick time. The policy is 10 days of vacation for the first few years and then 15 days after that (not including the sabbatical). Sick days are accrued at half a day a month, which means folks tend to show up to work while they're still contagious. Plenty of companies nowadays offer a solid month or even DTO (discretionary time off aka unlimited PTO)
