My experience working at Epic
I wanted to share my experience working at Epic. For context, I was a clinical TS for about 3 years.
I’ll start with the positives.
You’ll hear this a lot, but the people Epic hires really are great. It’s a bunch of hard workers and a lot of fun young people, often from around the country. People have diverse hobbies, though not necessarily diverse ethnic backgrounds.
The work itself can also be fairly fulfilling. Epic does help clinicians. The work you do is appreciated by the analysts you work with. At least for me, I enjoyed learning the system, troubleshooting issues, and getting that satisfaction when you help someone fix a problem.
The pay is incredible for an entry-level job. It is not often that a company will hire people with no experience, train them completely themselves, and then pay that much.
Now for the negatives.
The workload is ridiculous. The amount of work you have to do just to meet expectations is unrealistic for most people. Having five or six new issues a day, with varying levels of complexity, while everything keeps piling up, is just not realistic.
At the end of the day, Epic is a large corporation, and it has a lot of the issues large corporations have. You are measured on your performance and your numbers. That’s true at any job. But at Epic, if you aren’t meeting expectations, which in practice often means exceeding expectations, you are dispensable. Never forget that.
If you mess up more than once or twice, they will not hesitate to kick you out. The moment they want you gone, they will make sure you go. And the moment you’re put on a PIP, it is the steepest and deepest hole to dig out of.
My experience at Epic taught me what is true about most large corporations: your TLs are not your friends. You are being measured constantly. If you don’t meet their expectations, they will get rid of you.
I am grateful to Epic for bringing me to the Madison area. I’ve met the best community here, and I wouldn’t trade that for the world.
But my advice to anyone considering Epic is this: it is not sunshine and rainbows, despite how beautiful the campus is. You will work hard. You will be stressed. You may cry. But you’ll get paid.
For me, the pay wasn’t quite enough to justify the stress. But if you have nowhere else to turn, want to try something new, and get offered a job at Epic, take it. The people are great. The area is great.
But you are not a failure if you need to leave. If every waking day is consumed by stressing about work, even when you’re not at work, it is okay to leave.